The Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

The English translation of Les Cinq Sens has been a long time coming. After publication in 1985, Les Cinq Sens was awarded the Prix Médicis in Paris. Since then, Michel Serres has grown in popularity and standing. Some may claim that Serres’s works are impossible to translate due to their complex word play, neologisms and erratic style. Despite this, Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley should be commended for their mammoth efforts and superb translation. The translation has certainly done justice to the rhythm of the French work and the subtle associations embedded throughout; the countless inter and cross-textual references. In The Five Senses, Serres’s aim is to show that the development of language has both veiled and overtaken the primacy of the senses; or in the translators’ words, the “glories of our initial sensuous perception of the world” (xi). The cataloging nature of science and information technology has marginalised our relationship with the empirical and the authenticity of the experiential. Similarly, in certain philosophical circles, especially within the analytic tradition, the philosophy of language currently dominates over phenomenological accounts. Serres believes that the goal of philosophical inquiry is not to develop formal languages. This does not mean that logic is a useless endeavour, rather that it is not what constitutes philosophy as a whole. In this sense, Serres’s work is a defence of the empirical, the qualitative, and a rejection of the reductive tendency of logic. In an interview in 1991, Serres stated that he “would go so far as to say that a form of knowledge has been lost, an empirical form, blotted out by the linguistic and virtually algebraic revolution”. (Raoul Mortley, French philosophers in conversation: Levinas, Schneider, Serres, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Derrida, Routledge, 1991, 54–5.“Interview” from here on).