Leçon

• Published in: SubStance 2019-09, Vol.48 (3), p.3
• Main Author: Saint-Amand, Pierre
• Format: Article
• Language: eng ; fre
• Subjects: American literature; Ancient Greek; British & Irish literature; Cognition & reasoning; Creative process; Determinism; English literature; Federman, Raymond; French literature; Humanities; Jewish literature; Knowledge; Literary theory; Modernity; Rhetoric; Science; Serres, Michel (1930-2019); Tonality; Valery, Paul (1871-1945); Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
• ISSN: 0049-2426; 1527-2095

Serres’s eclectic, encyclopedic approach to knowledge, his refusal of disciplinary boundaries and fads, and his particular rigor as a thinker matched the convictions of the editors of SubStance and made him a natural ally and friend of the journal, someone whose presence is also visible in work published by the editors themselves. [...]had I been able to do it, something would still have been missing on the page, something that proved evident in another conference organized a year later (May 14, 1993) by Sydney Lévy, co-director with Michel Pierssens of SubStance, the title of which, What does Hermes know? Serres’ intonations, sculpted and colored by his beautiful accent from the southwest of France, were supported by his body effecting a sort of standing dance: it propelled itself forward on the tip of the toes to come back and down after the peak of intensity of the sentence had been reached. [...]you could also see it leap and stop in his body, constantly out of balance, akin to Paul Valéry’s pendulum oscillating between sound and sense.3 No doubt Michel Serres had perfectly assimilated the principles of ancient Greek rhetoric, which stated that, besides the art of convincing with general organization and configuration of discourse, there was the art of convincing through the person of the orator.