Contingency and the Enlightenment

CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THEORETICAL WRITING is at odds with the Enlightenment, strongly criticizing the idealism and humanism of its philosophers. A curious consensus emerges in the refutation, as well as the negation, of the heritage of the Enlightenment, whether one speaks of Foucault, Baudrillard or Lyotard. In Postmodern Theory, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner admirably expose the breadth of this critique in their assessment of its scope. What they analyze as “French postmodernism” should be considered a precise rupture with Descartes and the Enlightenment: “The developments in postmodern theory in France constituted a rupture with the French rationalist tradition, developed in the French Enlightenment” (16). They locate the source of this revolt in Comte and Durkheim, but see traces of it already in Sade, Bataille and Artaud, writers who initiated an explosive subversion of Reason. Poststructuralism merely continued the deconstruction of reason and its pretensions to totalization in another guise and by different means.

One might wonder whether Michel Serres should be included in this arena, where, in spite of the unique qualities of each critique, these various theoreticians find a common enemy. If so, then how does Serres specifically criticize the rationalist ideology of the philosophes?