In this first English translation of one of his most important works, Michel Serres presents the statue as more than a static entity: for Serres it is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Serres demonstrates how sacrificial art founded and still persists in society and reflects on the centrality of death and the statufied dead body to the human condition.
Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986; from Baal, the paintings of Carpaccio, and the Eiffel Tower, to Rodin's The Gates of Hell , the Challenger disaster and the literature of Maupassant, La Fontaine and Jules Verne. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, Statues plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways.
Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, Statues contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.
**
Review
“It is a great cause for celebration that Statues is at last available to English readers ... The book shows Serres at his audacious, restlessly inventive best, while Randolph Burks's translation catches brilliantly the tiptoe lightness of Serres's philosophical hopscotch and the gnarled gravity of his rhythms of thought.” ― Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
“Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as the creation of 'concepts that are always new'. It is difficult to justify this maxim better than Michel Serres does, not the least by the title concept of this book. Serres's 'statues' embody life and death, being and becoming, space and time, and history and present to make us rethink the world, and to make us think. This is 'a general treatise on sculpture' that, Serres tells us, 'the history of philosophy has never produced'-until this book, which brings together art, philosophy, science, and technology, as only Serres's book can. An indispensible work!” ― Arkady Plotnitsky, Director, Theory and Cultural Studies Program, Purdue University, USA
Book Description
Major contemporary theorist, Michel Serres, presents provocative new insights into the foundations of knowledge, society, experience and art, and how they relate to death.
The Second Book of Foundations
FC
1
Half title 2
Also available from Bloomsbury 3
Title 4
Copyright 5
Dedication 6
Contents 7
STATIONS 8
January 28, 1986
At 11:39
And 74 Seconds Later 10
THE ROCKET 11
First Foundation 11
THE SHELL, THE CANNON 24
Second Foundation 24
Recent Memories 35
DRIFTINGS IN THE CEMETERIES 36
Space 36
Before the War 50
FETISHES 51
Time 51
Around 1900 54
THE GATES OF HELL 55
Mass 55
THE EIFFEL TOWER 69
Work 69
1883–1884 80
THREE TALES BY MAUPASSANT 80
THE TIC 81
The Senses 81
THE HAIR 88
Object, Dead Body 88
BESIDE A DEAD MAN 95
Dentures, Movement 95
During the Grand Siècle 108
THE BEAM 109
Object, God 109
COSTUMES 114
Solid 114
Quattrocento 119
THE HAMMER 120
Homo Faber 120
About the Year 33 of our Era 126
MAGDALENE AND LAZARUS 127
Knowledge 127
Zero 147
RAPTURE 148
Weight 148
Fifth Century before Christ 150
EMPEDOCLES’S RETURN 151
Fire 151
Four Millennia Ago 166
THE SECRET OF THE SPHINX 167
Substitution 167
Undated 180
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS 181
Falling Bodies 181
ORPHEUS, LOT’S WIFE 188
Sculpture, Music 188
THE STATUE OF HESTIA 207
Epistemology 207
Notes 210

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Serres, Michel; Burks, Randolph

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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Publishing UK

Taylor & Francis Ltd

Methuen Drama

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

The Foundations Trilogy, London, 2014

1, 2014

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Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

2025-10-27