Anyone want to improve this?

This is a good blog post but the Google translator doesn't do it justice. Anyone with better chops than I want to take a run at improving it?

Here is the link to the original.

Here is the Google translation:

About Michel Serres

December 19, 2010 By Patrick rodel

 One of the themes announced in this blog is the thought of Michel Serres and behold, I almost forgot to report his latest book and the very rich book of Herne devoted to him.

 This book is called Biogée, Life and Earth to tell their fundamental continuity that we have insanely separated at the point of risking death. The work of the philosopher-Hill ("Greenhouse", in Gascon, meaning "hill", p.24) is haunted for years by the ravages of the hard sciences and political subservience to have made, and it is constantly forced to resume this theme because it is obvious he is not yet understood.

 But that, each time from a different input. One that retains Serres, here, is that experiments he made, personal and critical, this close relationship between what was known formerly kingdoms (mineral, plant, animal, human), not in his thinking ( thought, alone, always runs the risk of cutting oneself off from reality) but in his body flood of the Garonne or the earth trembles, California, birth or death which always fulfilled in the opening gaping of the earth-mother.

Biogée is thus the most personal book that Serres has given us the most "literary" as "writing" the most beautiful perhaps (what will not fail to reproach him in the little world of philosophy).There are pages on hallucinated ghost ships, lyrical evocations of the union of oak and linden, memories always present from childhood. Book meetings at the crossroads of his life and grace given to the joys they have created. "I sing these strong turbulence and weak, inert, alive and human, in roundels, chorus, repeatedly tunes, waltzes, ballads and barcaroles" (p. 179)

In this year of his eighty spring, Serres is the youngest and most Prohet of our thinkers. And I hope he remains a long time and we do not notice too late the importance of his work.

That this work is devoted to a Cahier de l'Herne, provided very items from around the world and enriched with a number of unpublished texts of Serres. I can not enter their analysis, it will take hours. I just want to remember that many say the friendship has developed between the author and Michel Serres from experiences in common whether it is a publishing project (the monumental Corpus of philosophers in French) a hiking or climbing (Anne-Marie Delaunay, "Variations on a rope"), whether a course or conference and trade that do not fail to ensue . 

This friendship is awakening of thought, awakening thought, it not be blinded by the problems that the philosophy of Serres no shortage of lift without necessarily provide an answer, she said the generosity of a teaching that has always preferred forward to new discoveries to stagnate in vain polemics. Those that media notoriety annoys discover that the reflection of Serres was built in solitude on the sidelines of the French philosophical institution too often encased in his mediocre power struggles and that novelty repels. Those who are repeating, without having read his books, this is not philosophy - because it does not find the trace of a certain academic rhetoric, may have the opportunity to become aware of their complexity and authenticity of their questioning.

For all those interested in the work of Serres this book is an indispensable tool. He is also in that it leaves open many avenues of research. We are far from having taken the full measure of the contribution of Serres.

Five Senses - a reflection from Stefan

You'll enjoy reading Stefan's post on what he thinks of Five Senses. Here is the introductory tidbit:

How to approach this book on the five senses (that aren't really five after all)? I loved it, but it's so hard to explain why. It's more the ideas it gives birth to than what's in it. But let me try:

Take your index finger and place it on your bottom lip. Do it! You have to do it, or you wont understand this post. Please do it.

Now, without moving, fix your attention on feeling your lip through your finger (do it, take your time, close your eyes if it helps). OK? Now, shift perspective, and feel your finger through your lip. Isn't that amazing?! One moment you are in your finger, feeling your lip - another moment you are in your lip, feeling your finger! Your consciousness, your self-awareness is somehow shifting place, moving from inside your lip and outside your finger to inside your finger and outside your lip. Yet only one event, one touch, is actually happening. So where are you? In this encounter, this relation, this instance of first-hand knowledge, you are both the knowing subject and the known object. You are outside and inside.

Read more of Stefan's post here.

The Facebook Neural Network - with disparity included

A fine addition to the brilliant blue map that I posted yesterday. This one includes mapping data showing high population densities along with the Facebook digital neural networks. The disparity evident in this map is also very much in keeping with the growing divide that technology can fuel and that Serres laments in Angels.

The Facebook Neural Network

This image of global Facebook usage reveals the extent to which our societies, cultures, businesses and friendships do indeed form an electrical nervous system of exchange and communication. There are myriad angels in this image, winging their way around the world at luminal velocities. This image feels very Serresian, indeed.

Alfred Korzybski: Another Geographer of Thought

Alfred Korzybski came up with the phrase "the map is not the territory" and other things. Has anyone read Korzybski? I have not and came across him via this theory of communications post that features Korzybski, The Natural Contract and other communications theory ideas.






After a quick skim of his original Preface for Science and Sanity, I saw that Korzybski notes the implications of new advances in a unified field theory: 

While correcting the proofs of this Preface, I read a telegraphic press report from London by Science Services, that Professor Max Born, by the application of the non-elementalistic methods of Einstein, has succeeded in making a major contribution to the formulation of a unified field theory which now includes the quantum mechanics. Should this announcement be verified in its scientific aspects, our understanding of the structure of ‘matter’, ‘electron’, etc., would be greatly advanced and would involve of course most important practical applications.

Here is the link to a full online version of his Science and Sanity. If anyone else is familiar with Korzybski, I'd be interested to learn more about his life and work.

Serres and the US Debate Circuit

I have happily discovered that Serres's work is being utilized by US debate teams. Jamie Saker, a debate coach says:

We've had an interesting experience with Serres on the debate circuit. Iowa despises "critical" debate (anything beyond advocating policies), where Nebraska is highly critical. We reside on the faultline, closer geographically and philosophically to Nebraska. The current Angels case (with support from Genesis, The Natural Contract, and Latour's Conversations) is interesting but it's a bit complicated. I'm working on an edit for this weekend that narrows the alternative/advocacy portion down since we have too many things in motion. The critique others have of Serres doing "too much at one time" and jumping from Lucretius to Plato to Los Angeles of the sky to Goya in little space/time is even more challenging when you're constrained by an 8 minute affirmative constructive speech.

Indeed. Has anyone else seen Serres's work show up on this kind of debate format? Jamie has also been interested, as noted elsewhere in this blog, in getting English translations of more of Serres's work.