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Limits as Lines, Lines as Boundaries: Drawing From and With the Work of Michel Serres


Lilian Kroth, University of Fribourg

 

 

Limits, boundaries, and borders are a strikingly prominent topic in the work of French philosopher of science Michel Serres – even though his thinking seems, at first sight, to be rather at odds with them as a primary concern. His reservations towards limits and boundaries as ontological givens, as politically non-negotiable, or straightforwardly socially constructed turn out to be highly productive for engaging with these varied phenomena. Thinking through Michel Serres’s philosophy of limits was the focus of my PhD research between 2019-2023, in the course of which I used drawing as a critical and speculative method to engage with the logics and aesthetics of heterogenous limit formations.


In this paper, I would like to show a selected number of drawings from this process, and to invite an engagement with epistemological, performative, and material processes of making lines, boundaries and borders as widely heterogenous forms in the universe of Michel Serres’s thinking. For this, I will mark some specific questions in my approach through the process of drawing, and show how these intersect with my philosophical readings. Aspects and challenges of this process include the problem of “structuring” a work on limits itself, transitions from figures of the limit to abstractions, metaphorological underpinnings, and the intersection and relation between different limit formations such as geometric, topological, and entropic limits.


From there, I would like to develop a notion of drawing and line-making with Serres, encompassing both an exposition of his own philosophical vocabulary, such as the “transcendental objective”, “translation”, “the soft and hard” and “figures of thought”, and to put these in context and difference to other French philosophers of the limit (and notions such as “images of thought, for example). What I try to develop is that drawing articulates, exposes, and imagines Serres’s philosophy that crystallizes both as a historically embedded and innovative approach to the questions of limits, borders, and boundaries: as forms of separation and exclusion, as zones of contact, and as aesthetic operators that take a passage between the sciences and the humanities.

 

Keywords: Michel Serres, philosophy, limits, boundaries, translation


Biography
Lilian Kroth is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her PhD project at the University of Cambridge engaged with Michel Serres’s philosophy of limits, borders, and boundaries. Prior to that, she studied Philosophy at the University of Vienna (BA, MA) and Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (with a focus on drawing). She is an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) and the University of Groningen, and one of the organizers of the CRASSH research network “Remote Sensing. Ice, Instruments, Imagination” in Cambridge.