The Enemy of Aggression

Zach Gibson revisits Michel Serres’s “Hermes” series by way of Randolph Burks’s new translation.

By Zach GibsonSeptember 11, 2025

• Science & Technology

• Philosophy & Religion

THE SUCCESSFUL MEASUREMENT of the Great Pyramid of Cheops by Thales of Miletus in the sixth century BCE marked the dawn of “the Greek Miracle,” according to philosopher of science Michel Serres.

The “legend” of Thales runs as follows: by waiting until the length of his shadow was equal to his own height, Thales formed an imaginary right triangle with points at his feet, his own head, and that of his shadow. After using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the length of the distance between his height and his shadow’s length, he measured a similar imaginary right triangle between the pyramid and its shadow, then used proportions to accurately calculate the pyramid’s height.

Using neither touch, the medium of “physical measurement,” nor sight, the medium of “optical measurement,” but relations, Thales generated an entirely new medium for the act of measurement that relied on mathematical modeling. Thales’s “miracle” paved the way, as Serres recounts, for the “emergence of an abstract form and an abstract reasoning” that no longer required immediate sensory perception. In creating a way of reliably measuring intangible aspects of concrete phenomena, he broadened the horizon of what we can confidently claim to know about the world we inhabit.

Notably, Thales combined the measurement of space (through Pythagorean geometry) with the measurement of time (through chronometry, as made possible by the sundial). “What Thales saw at the foot of the pyramids,” writes Serres, was not simply the pyramid, the sun, and its shadow, but a radically new world of communication and “transport” linking myth, science, and philosophy.

Michel Serres, who taught at both the Sorbonne and Stanford University from the late 1960s until his death in 2019, began to construct a road map for this “philosophy of transport” in Hermes, a five-volume collection of thematically linked essays published between 1969 and 1980. Among Serres’s earliest published works, these volumes include philological deep dives into the etymological subconscious of fairy tales (e.g., “Cinderella”); revisionist readings of canonical philosophers (e.g., René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz); insightful reviews of work by his contemporaries (e.g., Michel Foucault); meditations on breakthrough discoveries in 19th- and 20th-century biology, physics, and information science; and a full-throated critique of the “new scientific spirit” embodied by his mentor Gaston Bachelard. The series also features literary expositions featuring a diverse cast of authors such as Jules Verne, Jules Michelet, and William Faulkner. As if all of this weren’t enough, Serres also wages a belligerent polemic against the military-industrial complex.

Hermes set the tone for much of Serres’s subsequent writings. Those works have been translated into English, but the bulk of the Hermes essays were not until recently. The University of Minnesota Press began rolling out English translations in 2023. The second, Interference, translated by Randolph Burks, appeared this year. The third is slated for release in 2026. Minnesota plans to follow with translations of the concluding volumes, La Distribution (Distribution) and Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (The Northwest Passage).

Serres came of age in the late 1940s, when “one could not work in physics without having been deafened by the universal noise of Hiroshima,” as he told Bruno Latour in 1990. His most pressing desire was to reestablish communication among the disciplinary silos of mid-20th-century institutions. Indeed, his work is saturated with the fear that the rigidly bureaucratized, highly specialized, and efficiently routinized postwar paradigm posed a dire threat to humanity.

Institutional science had lost its conscience, he thought. Worse, its compartmentalized knowledge had spawned a brood of specialists whom he described as “a species deprived of speech, unable to make itself understood by neighboring species.” It had abandoned the dialogic exchange of knowledge between “masters” and “countermasters” in favor of endless competition between “masters, who have the principal attribute of knowing nothing.”

Like Michel Foucault—who argued that power cannot be wielded without the support of knowledge, while knowledge cannot be cultivated without propagating power—Serres saw a perilous interdependence between power and knowledge that leaves discovery, innovation, and progress open to appropriation and abuse. “Knowing,” he writes in “Betrayal,” an essay in Hermes III, “is practicing an exercise that has degeneratively involuted into the ideology of command and obedience” (translation my own). Thales’s measurement of the pyramids was, on the one hand, a liberating miracle. On the other, it was an “immense historical catastrophe” that paved the way for technologies of death and destruction. To instrumentalize knowledge in the service of domination is to forget the “discovery of communication through dialogue” that made knowledge possible in the first place.

As Serres has it, “successful communication is the enemy of aggression.”

The crisis of instrumentalized reason can, then, only be ameliorated by a pluralistic revival of dialogue among disciplines. Hermes, whom Serres invokes playfully, operates as a figurative motif, tutelary deity, and dramatic persona. During his conversation with Latour (as translated by Roxanne Lapidus), he clarified the messenger god’s role in his books:

We must conceive or imagine how Hermes flies and gets about when he carries messages from the gods—or how angels travel. And for this one must describe the spaces situated between things that are already marked out—spaces of interference, as I called them in the title of my second book on Hermes. This god or these angels pass through folded time, making millions of connections. Between has always struck me as a preposition of prime importance.

Serres saw himself as taking up the Hermetic mantle.

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The Homeric Hymns repeatedly invoke Hermes as “polytropos,” an appellation that the god shares with Odysseus. The adjective, which can be literally translated as “much-traveled” or “much-wandering,” has been rendered in English as “the man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d” by Alexander Pope, “the man of twists and turns” by Robert Fagles, and “complicated” by Emily Wilson. But perhaps the approximation of polytropos that best serves Serres’s project is a recent one by Daniel Mendelsohn. Through a cleverly placed enjambment in the epic’s opening invocation, “Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / To wander, driven off course,” Mendelsohn playfully allows polytropos to work across several registers. The word itself takes on a polytropic sense. It retains the literal reference to travel, conveys Odysseus’ characteristic wiliness, and, most importantly, suggests that these traits might be to blame for the detour that prolongs his return to Ithaca. For Serres, the figure of Hermes is, then, useful because it is so multiform, elastic, and slippery that even the words we use to describe his protean nature are elusive. Mendelsohn’s polysemic translation of the word is, in short, strikingly apropos.

The point is that effective communication demands that we be as lithe, flexible, and mobile as Odysseus and Hermes. We must, believed Serres, keep in constant motion to establish a reciprocal give-and-take between ourselves and others, in the process ceaselessly altering our understanding.

Where Hermes gives Serres’s project its mythological patronym, the 17th-century polymath philosopher, mathematician, and diplomat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lends it its organizing principles. Many of the essays in the book’s first volume were written alongside Serres’s mathematically rigorous 1968 book, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques. They underscore the significance of that book’s abstract metaphysical speculation. Notably, Leibniz held to a peculiar theory of causal relationships that rejected direct interaction between substances created by God. Serres transposed this theory into a pluralistic view of causality that prioritized structure over linearity. Equally relevant for Serres, Leibniz suggested elsewhere that monads, the simplest elementary particles of existence, do not communicate directly with one another, but instead act in sync according to a prescribed harmonic system established by God. “Everybody,” according to Serres’s interpretation of Leibniz, “is affected by everything that happens in the universe, to such an extent that he who sees all can read in each thing what happens everywhere.”

From this, Serres worked to establish a “structural method” of inquiry, research, argumentation, and knowledge that relies on a “multilinearity [of] pathways,” and a “plurivocity of types of relations.” He defined “structure” early in Hermes as follows:

an operational ensemble with an undefined meaning (whereas an archetype is a concrete ensemble with an overdefined meaning), grouping together any number of elements of unspecified content and a finite number of relationships of an unspecified nature but whose function is defined, as are certain results concerning the elements.

In themselves, the laws that govern the meaning of a structure that organizes a set of “archetypes” are meaningless. However, like Leibniz’s system of preestablished harmony, they govern the rules for combining a given ensemble of archetypes. Serres positioned this method against linear, dialectical argument, as well as against René Descartes’s intuitive path to knowledge.

At its most basic, we can see what Serres is describing in the challenges translators face when working in two languages with distinct rules of grammar. For example, in his introduction to his 1997 translation of Aesthetic Theory by Theodor Adorno, Robert Hullot-Kentor explains that because German can “refer by pronouns with specificity across any distance of text, long or short, and juggle many nouns with referential consistency” in a way that English cannot, he found himself forced to make compromises between syntactic clarity and tedious repetition. Mendelsohn’s translation of the word polytropos is an embodiment of Serresian structuralism; it does not rely on a one-to-one correspondence between the Greek word and a cognate in English but instead uses the poem’s formal elements to gesture to the original word as untranslatable. “[P]ut succinctly,” Serres writes, “truth is only a certain relation that a sentence or a word maintains with its language or that a systematic atom maintains with its family.”

Already in the introductory essay to Hermes I, “The Communication Network: Penelope,” Serres explicitly aligns himself with Leibniz, suggesting that the pursuit of knowledge is best imagined as a network, “composed, at any given instant […], of a plurality of points (vertices) interconnected by a plurality of ramifications (paths).” Each point stands as an isolated thesis or idea; each path represents the link connecting two or more of these theses. Anticipating Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s comparison of thought to the horizontal, nonlinear composition of rhizomes, Serres prioritizes paths, linkages, and connections over the points themselves. “[N]o point is privileged,” he writes, “and none is univocally subordinate to any other.”

The points are like pieces on a chessboard. A piece’s constitutive features remain the same from the beginning until the end of a match, but its value varies as surrounding pieces move from one position to another according to the contingencies of the individual game and the rules of chess. Isolated and alone in a far corner of the board, a pawn might accurately reflect the standard point value of 1, but when positioned alongside other pawns, its local value becomes nebulous.

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Where Serres set out to establish the general parameters for the structures that govern communication in Hermes I, he explores how communication takes place within the specific structure of contemporary science in Hermes II: Interference. Here, Serres argues against a single “queen” science that dictates a method of inquiry for other disciplines. Contemporary science, he writes, is marked by “the collapse of the partitioning that formerly made the encyclopedia into an association of cells.” Knowledge is less an index than a continuum. Disciplinary boundaries are artifactual and provisional.

“The unity of circulation, the pluralist epistemology, the philosophy of transport,” Serres writes, “shatter all dogmatism forever.”

Positioning interference against reference, he humorously—in typical Serres fashion—drifts between colloquial and strict etymological use of both terms. “Interference” does not simply connote disjunctive interruption but also means to inter­-ferre, or “carry between.” Likewise, “reference” simultaneously means to allude to something and to re­-ferre, or “carry back.” Contemporary philosophy and science ought therefore to jettison the act of reference. The structure of knowledge is not a collection of discrete points that gradually accumulate information but an interdependent network of relations and points of connection. Again: Connections take priority over individual nodes. In the interaction between chemistry and biology, for example, Serres is less concerned with what a biologist might take back to their research from chemistry, or a chemist from biology, than with their ongoing interaction. Thought is not just to be found in continuous transport between them, but is also “here-elsewhere, multilinear in its network, multivalent in its discourse.”

Consider the disciplinary convergence made possible in 1774 when British Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne calculated the density and mass of the earth. Maskelyne’s undertaking was deceptively simple (indeed, somewhat in the manner of Thales’s measurement of the pyramids). Hanging a plumb line from the side of Schiehallion, a cone-shaped mountain in Perthshire, Scotland, he and his team then measured the mountain’s gravitational attraction by observing the pendulum’s deviation from a line of perfectly vertical suspension. After calculating the line’s angle of deflection, Maskelyne tested it against Isaac Newton’s recently formulated laws of gravitation and a viable estimation of Schiehallion’s mass by the mathematician Charles Hutton. The data gathered during the experiment allowed Maskelyne to extrapolate a rough estimate for the planet’s total density; his conclusive figure, 5480 ± 250 kilograms per cubic meters, wrote John R. Smallwood in a 2007 study in the Scottish Journal of Geology, remains “in agreement with the modern value of 5515 [kilograms per cubic meters].”

To make the precise measurements necessary to gather his data, Maskelyne relied on a pair of atmospheric barometers, a telescopic zenith sector, an extremely precise pendulum clock, and a brass quadrant. Even more importantly, however, his experiment was indebted to a coordinated convergence of innovative developments in the 17th- and 18th-century sciences that included land surveying, geology, meteorology, physics, and astronomy.

The merit of his results went well beyond the entry of a new data point to a growing catalog. Its conclusion carried implications for almost as many different types of knowledge and so set in motion a series of interfering reverberations across the scientific landscape.

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In his later work, Serres was firmly committed to restoring sensuality and direct experience as coequal partners to logic and language in the pursuit of knowledge. Though he did not dispute the valuable advances made possible by analytical reason, he feared that the rigid and purifying thought process undergirding the new scientific spirit had removed our senses from the complex web of relations that constitute our lives beyond the laboratory. The “imperialism” of “rational” inquiry breaks our experience into its component parts for close inspection but, he argued, disregards as mere background noise what it cannot apprehend. Worse, in its ever-refining quest for reductive purity, rational inquiry often fails to put the parts of our experience back together.

The demand for precise, expository language, as Serres later argued in The Five Senses (1985), amounts to an addiction that anesthetizes us against sensuality. Rather than opening ourselves up to the world, language forces us to turn toward the abstract and ultimately illusory certainty offered by words.

Serres’s own writing, by contrast, is impressionistic; it relies on fleeting, ephemeral, almost precognitive imagery to conjure sensual, affective experiences that elude conventional description. His approach is deeply expressive, juxtaposing long strings of adjectives or pictorial subordinate clauses to convey new ideas that take shape in the reader’s mind as images. Among his favorites are those of spirals, loops, eddies, and whirlpools, surely apt metaphors for the helical, recursive nonlinearity of his sentences’ composition. These gesture toward novel concepts or unrepresentable experiences through variation, repetition, and triangulation. For Serres, style, as he explains to Latour, is “the sign of innovation, of passage into new territory.”

Commenting on the University of Clermont-Ferrand’s decision to separate its library of science from its library of letters, Serres asked, “How could you tear apart the very pages of Leibniz, Pascal, Plato, Aristotle, Diderot, Lewis Carroll, and so many others?” Serres’s Hermes project, written in his unique style, is a bid to mend this tear in order to restore a sense of epistemic wholeness and even sensuality to the modern academy’s rigid and abstracted-from-reality disciplinary cubicles.