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For the first time in English, the introductory volume in a major French philosopher’s groundbreaking series of poetic transdisciplinary works

Michel Serres is recognized as one of the giants of postwar French philosophy of knowledge, along with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilbert Simondon. His early five-volume series Hermes, which appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, was an intellectual supernova in its proposition that culture and science shared the same mythic and narrative structures. Hermes I: Communication marks the start of a major publishing endeavor to introduce this foundational series into English. 

Building on the figure of the Greek god Hermes, who presides over the realms of communication and interpretation, Hermes I embarks on a reflection concerning the history of mathematics via Descartes and Leibniz and culminates by way of a Bachelardian logoanalytic reading of Homer, Dumas, Molière, Verne, and the story of Cinderella. We observe a singular poetic philosopher seeking to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the sciences through a profound mathematical and poetic fable regarding information theory, history, and art, establishing a new way to think about the production of knowledge during the late twentieth century. In these pages, students and scholars of philosophy will discover an extraordinary project of thought as vital to critical reflection today as it was fifty years ago.

Unveiling the hidden connections in the network of knowledge

Hermes II: Interference is the second in a series of works by philosopher Michel Serres using Hermes, god of communication, as an archetypal symbolic figure for reflecting on philosophy and the arts and sciences. Serres delves into the concept of interreferentiality, proposing that every node—whether it be knowledge, objects, or people—exists within a network where it both receives and transmits information. He argues against the existence of a dominant center or pole within these networks, emphasizing that each node can temporarily serve as a focal point depending on context.

Serres presents unique insights into topics such as the nature of knowledge, the world of objects, intersubjectivity, the origins of geometry, the interplay of music and background noise, and empiricism. By identifying parallel structures across these areas, Serres unifies them into a comprehensive theoretical framework, revealing hidden connections and potential future influences. Additionally, this work includes a critique of Gaston Bachelard’s The Formation of the Scientific Mind and concludes with an analysis of communication in Hergé’s The Castafiore Emerald.

Hermes II is a unique blend of ancient and modern perspectives, combining rigorous analysis with an optimistic outlook and highlighting the interconnectedness of knowledge and its implications for fostering peaceful relations within the network of life.

Unlocking the hidden patterns of knowledge—where science, art, and philosophy speak a common language

Hermes III: Translation is the third volume in Michel Serres’s renowned Hermes series, an ambitious exploration of the deep interconnections among disparate fields of knowledge. While Hermes II: Interference traced the overlapping echoes of ideas across realms, Hermes III moves to translate the structural logics of one field—be it genetics, painting, or philosophy—into the language of another. Revealing how the humanities, science, and art share hidden combinatory architectures, Serres exposes the underlying unity of knowledge systems typically thought distinct.

Through an array of examples—from Monod’s Chance and Necessity to works by Descartes, Leibniz, Comte, Turner, and Roumain—Serres shows how translation uncovers informational and mathematical patterns that shape both ancient and modern thought. This illuminating methodology leads Serres to issue a stark warning: when knowledge is detached from its guiding purpose, it becomes vulnerable to appropriation by destructive political forces.

Yet Serres’s vision remains ultimately hopeful. By tracing knowledge systems back to their mythic and structural roots, Hermes III: Translation gestures toward more harmonious relationships between fields. A rare synthesis of philosophy, science, art, and literature, this work will engage readers interested in the interdependence of disciplines and the possibilities for a more unified, humane understanding of knowledge.

How order, meaning, and knowledge emerge from noise across science, literature, and philosophy

Hermes IV: Distribution is the fourth and penultimate volume in Michel Serres’s landmark series on knowledge and communication across disciplines. This collection of essays investigates how order emerges from noise, using thermodynamics and information theory as structural models applicable to science, literature, and culture alike. Moving beyond the themes of interference and translation developed in earlier volumes, Serres focuses on distribution: the processes by which systems take shape, endure, and eventually disperse.

At the core of the book is a dynamic vision of knowledge as an unstable formation. Systems arise from chance encounters or deviations that, through repetition, harden into law. They resist entropy by remaining open to external inputs, forming temporary pockets of negentropy within a wider field of chaos. Space, time, energy, language, and meaning are all shown to emerge from such conditions of mixture and imbalance.

Serres develops his argument through a striking range of materials, including fables, myths, literary texts, philosophy, and the history of science. The result is an uncommon synthesis of hard science and the humanities that reveals shared structures across domains while affirming the irreducible plurality of their laws and methods.

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Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and war in U.S. literature after 1945

Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to come to terms with and even to cultivate.

Recasting an expansive range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies, (eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language.