Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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MICHEL SERRES’S LEIBNIZIAN STRUCTURALISM

Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier

To cite this article: Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier (2019) MICHEL SERRES’S LEIBNIZIAN
STRUCTURALISM, Angelaki, 24:6, 3-21, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684693

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 24 number 6 december 2019
Le Croisic 1 by Roger Martin.
For the past twenty years, we have all become
neo-Leibnizian.1
o date, Michel Serres’s role in the structur-
T alist moment has been surprisingly over-
looked, not only in the English-speaking
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/19/060003-19 © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684693
3
lucie kim-chi mercier
MICHEL SERRES’S
LEIBNIZIAN
STRUCTURALISM
context for lack of translations but also in the
scholarship in French. Yet in the early 1960s
Serres was emerging among the most influential
voices of his generation. Admitted to the É cole
Normale Supérieure in the same year as Jacques
Derrida, taught and supervised by Georges Can-
guilhem, his early research includes writings on
the origin of geometry and on the philosophy of
mathematics, as well as on the epistemology and
history of science.2 Serres worked on his doc-
toral thesis between 1960 and 1968 while he
was teaching, along with Michel Foucault, in
the Philosophy Department of the University
of Clermont-Ferrand, then directed by the phi-
losopher of mathematics and epistemologist
Jules Vuillemin. Serres had not initially
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
planned to write a monograph on Leibniz but
sought to pursue his interests in the philosophy
of mathematics. After completing his first
degree (diplôme d’études supeŕ ieures) on the
philosophy of algebra under Bachelard’s gui-
dance, he began to work on the philosophy of
topology, under Canguilhem’s supervision. Pro-
gressively, however, what was supposed to
provide only background context for his thesis
expanded into a massive monograph: Le
System̀ e de Leibniz et ses modèles mathéma-
tiques. Étoiles–schémas–points. Published
shortly after its public defence in the tumultu-
ous month of June 1968,3 this labyrinthine
volume reconstructs the connections between
mathematics and metaphysics in Leibniz’s
works, reading his theories of representation,
progress, and his Monadology from the
vantage point of his mathematical research on
combinatorics, algebra, arithmetic, conic sec-
tions, etc. In this massive monograph, Serres
laid the groundwork of his early philosophy,
developing a full-blown philosophy of trans-
lation and interference (or transdisciplinarity),
as well as a general model of epistemological
pluralism predicated on his reading of Leibniz’s
oeuvre. The book won a CNRS bronze medal in
1968 and was described, in André Robinet’s
review of it, as a “watershed in the approaches
to Leibniz’s philosophy.”4
Whilst structuralism has long been evoked as
a transitory phase (and failure, overall) in the
history of French thought, in recent years
there has been a resurgence of interest in struc-
turalism’s historical and philosophical stakes. In
the English-speaking context, particular empha-
sis has been placed on the rationalist and
French-epistemological roots of 1960s structur-
alism (Hallward and Peden; Eyers; Peden).
Especially influential, Knox Peden’s Spinoza
contra Phenomenology recast the history of
French structuralism in the larger genealogy of
the “rationalist resistance to phenomenology.”
Against the North American refashioning of
structuralism as French Theory, the latter
chose to inscribe the structuralist moment “in
a more basic philosophical rationalism”5 by fol-
lowing a Spinozist thread running from
Cavaillès to Deleuze, through Gueroult and
Desanti. In the French context it is the paradox-
ical unity of structuralism as a movement – epis-
temological, ontological, historical, or
methodological – that has warranted in-depth
re-examinations since the early 2000s (Balibar,
“Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject”;
“Structuralism: Method”; Maniglier, La Vie;
Le Moment; Milner, Le Périple). Opening this
sequence, Jean-Claude Milner’s important Le
Périple structural (2002) set out to capture the
gist of the structuralist adventure through a
number of relatively simple epistemological,
methodological, and ontological propositions.
For Milner the most remarkable aspect of struc-
turalism consisted in its epistemological minim-
alism, that is, the substitution of resemblance
by difference as the only principle of identity.
Milner assumes a normative description of
structuralism: analysing a series of interventions
that were swarming around structural themes in
the 1960s (G. Dumézil, C. Lévi-Strauss, É . Ben-
veniste), he considers that we can clarify the
meaning of “structuralism” if and only if we
restrict it to a specific constellation of interven-
tions centred on the Saussure–Lacan axis. On
this account, the structuralist movement
would be essentially double, split between the
historical developments of a precise scientific
programme and that of the structuralist doxa
(Deleuze, Barthes, Foucault) – an adulterated
version of structuralism “proper.” Contrasting
with such a view, Patrice Maniglier argues con-
vincingly that the unity of structuralism does
not reside in any given methodological or epis-
temological principle, but in its programmatic
and future-oriented character: “structuralism”
would be defined primarily as a certain
horizon of anticipation, a projected unity that
renewed itself ceaselessly through unfinished,
essentially speculative experiments.6 In these
experiments, different types of structures (lin-
guistic, aesthentic, mathematical, cybernetic)
coexisted, forming a unity through family
resemblance (as in Deleuze’s famous prop-
osition) rather than an identity of principles.
In this article I will revisit Serres’s doctoral
thesis, Le System ̀ e de Leibniz et ses model̀ es
mathem ́ atiques as an intervention in and on
structuralism. I will show that his thesis did
4

not simply apply a concept of structure found
elsewhere (in mathematics) on Leibniz’s philos-
ophy but that it combined at least three types of
structural registers: mathematical, methodic,7
and metaphysical. Like Foucault in The Order
of Things (a book to which Serres seems to
have contributed indirectly),8 Serres’s ambition
was to write an “archeology of structuralism”
via Leibniz. In the early 1960s Serres and Fou-
cault had both decided to demonstrate that
structuralism enacted the “return” of certain
philosophical aspects of the Classical Age. In
focusing on Serres’s book on Leibniz, my aim
is both to reconstruct a forgotten chapter of
the history of structuralism and to shed light
on a Leibnizian rather than Spinozist undercur-
rent of French (neo)rationalism. The Leibnizian
lineage then evoked by Serres was a structural-
ism of systems, relations, and operations, a gen-
eralized systems-theory with its source in
Wiener’s cybernetics and Bourbaki’s structural
mathematics. More than Derrida, Foucault, or
Deleuze ever did, Serres placed a special wager
on the concept of information, a concept
which he analysed from a mathematical, techni-
cal, and political angle in his early Hermes̀
anthologies (La Communication; L’Interfeŕ -
ence; La Traduction). Taking, like Lévi-
Strauss, the “quasitranscendental powers”9 of
cybernetics seriously, he considered that a gen-
eralized theory of communication would even-
tually overcome post-Kantian epistemology.
Written in the early 1960s, first published in
1968, Le System ̀ e de Leibniz constitutes his
first attempt at modelling a generalized “struc-
ture-epistemology of networks,” one that is
built upon two fundamental pillars of Leibniz’s
philosophy: pluralism and perspectivism. I will
show that by turning Leibniz’s philosophy into a
“system of models” Serres devised a “transla-
tional” or “transformational” structuralism,
grounded on a pluralism of language-systems.
It will appear that in terms of method such
structuralism stands in surprising proximity to
the second structuralism of Claude Lévi-
Strauss (Mythologiques) and to more recent
developments at the convergence of philosophy
and anthropology (Viveiros de Castro).
However, it fundamentally clashes with forms
5
mercier
of ontological immanence derived from struc-
turalism by Deleuze or Althusser, often con-
sidered (mistakenly) as the paramount feature
of French philosophical structuralism as a
whole.
structuralism as classicism
Michel Serres’s contribution to French struc-
turalism has generally been confined to a
single essay, “Analyse symbolique et méthode
structurale,”10 a 1961 article in which Serres
put forward an ambitious structuralist pro-
gramme in philosophy. The article articulates
structuralism as a moment in a historical dia-
lectic between two fundamental types of philo-
sophical critique, or two logics of form,
schematized as “symbolic” (or Romantic) and
“formal” (or Classical). Serres argues that
there has been an epochal shift between the
symbolic typologies of the nineteenth century
(Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud) and structuralist
formalism, which “does not refer to an ideal
model as a normative index but constructs a
concrete model within the field under analy-
sis.”11 More importantly, this article sought
to clarify the notion of structure against its
unchecked proliferation in the social sciences.
For Serres, if truly inter- or transdisciplinary,
structuralism needed first to resolve a
problem of importation or importability, start-
ing with the notion of “structure” itself. He
held that the most importable structures
emerged from modern algebra:
[…] a structure is a set of undefined signif-
ications (whereas an archetype is a concrete
ensemble with over-defined significations)
[…] grouping elements in any number
(elements the content of which is not speci-
fied) and relations, in finite number, the
nature of which remains undefined, except
for their function regarding the elements.
We obtain a model (a paradigm) of this struc-
ture if we specify the content of elements and
the nature of relations in a determinate way.
Thus, this structure is the formal analogon
of all the concrete models it organizes.
Instead of symbolizing a content, a model
“realizes” a structure. This word has here
this precise meaning and never another one.
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
We can understand the frenzy that it gener-
ates only if we think of the telephone game
that progressively deteriorates knowledge
through word-of-mouth.12
This early definition situates Serres’s structur-
alist enterprise on very different terrain from
the linguistic-based, post-Saussurean approach
that has dominated the philosophical debate
about structuralism since. One immediate
implication of turning to a mathematical,
rather than linguistic, model of structure can
be gleaned from a comparison in passing with
Gilles Deleuze’s 1967 “How do we Recognize
Structuralism?” It concerns the status of struc-
tural relations. For Serres, the relational
regime in which elements are entangled can
be determined through a model and the
abstract structure gains concretion through a
model, thus implying the existence of distinct
levels of abstraction. In Deleuze’s definition
of structure the elements mutually specify
each other; they are determined in their differ-
ential relation, i.e., they cannot be defined by a
class of elements and hold together imma-
nently.13 The opposition or differential interpo-
sition of these elements constitutes the general
systematicity of the structure and the mark of
the symbolic as “pure logic of relations.”
Serres’s account of structure, by contrast,
points to a potentially definable class of
elements, which function as invariants. Serres
emphasizes the notions of function (rules of
formation) and models. For him, the pro-
duction of sense is ensured not through the
repetition of the relation (the differential) but
through the repeatability of its models. As a
result, the relations that ground his structural-
ism can be defined in a manifold way: they are
not limited to relations of oppositions or differ-
ence but can take a range of specifications. This
distinction will become crucial to Serres’s
invention of a “Leibnizian structuralism,” in
which he reconstructs Leibniz’s “system” as a
multiplicity of entangled networks.
a network-structure
̀ e de Leibniz’s hefty methodologi-
In Le System
cal introduction, Serres defines his
undertaking as “a study of the problems of
systematicity posed by Leibniz’s philosophy”
(SL 2). A prolific polymath, Leibniz never
put his system together as an integrated
whole: he “constructed a system, that is a
space, but he never made a book, that is a
line pursued from bottom to end, […]
except in narrow and synoptic opusculae,
where he indefinitely repeated himself” (SL
1). Grasping this fuzzy totality would remain
an infinite task if there were no organizational
clues within Leibniz’s writings, as Serres
writes:
Fortunately, Leibniz’s system is made so
that, continually and in a single movement,
it constructs itself and speaks of itself, it
forms itself and describes its formation; so
that it intertwines its semantics and its
syntax. And this continuous discourse on
the organization and internal to the organiz-
ation itself, is such that it renders this infinite
task terminable. (SL 3)
Serres considers that the Leibnizian systemati-
city contains its own reflexive language, its
own internal epistemology. This formal dis-
course configures a transversal optics that is at
the same time immanent to each sample and
expressive of the whole of Leibniz’s systemati-
city. Unravelling Leibniz’s system via its math-
ematical models thus amounts to
demonstrating that a finite number of formal
notions distribute themselves across different
regions of his Encyclopedia; that the same
types of mathematical reasoning on combinato-
rics, arithmetic, or conic sections are operative
across his reflections on metaphysics, theology,
law, history, and so on. As he claims to grasp
the epistemological language intrinsic to Leib-
niz’s systematicity, Serres offers a rigorous
application of the principle, so crucial to the
French epistemological tradition, according to
which epistemology can no longer afford an
overbearing or metadiscursive position in
relation to the sciences but can at most accom-
pany its course or uncover the theory imma-
nently produced by the sciences themselves.14
For the young Serres, the best example of
such a reflexive discourse was provided by the
6

modernization and standardization of math-
ematics realized by the Bourbaki group, a collec-
tive of young mathematicians whose outlook
had come to dominate the world of French
mathematics during Serres’s student years.
The anonymous collective of mathematicians
(spearheaded by André Weil, Jean Dieudonné,
or Henri Cartan, among others) had proceeded
to a systematic reconstruction of mathematics
which, under the aegis of a general axiomatics,
sought to unify all mathematical disciplines
through a single axiomatic architecture.15 For
Serres, this constituted a crucial event in the
history of mathematics, chiefly because it
entailed a shift in the focus of mathematical
thought, from determinate objects such as
numbers to purer, strictly indeterminate
objects: “the object is no more than the object
X, the object in general [l’objet quelconque].”16
Whilst mathematics used to evolve “longitudin-
ally” through the progressive conquest of
domains of marginal objects, modern math-
ematics “aims at a completely different type of
generality,” obtained through a “transversal
and regressive standpoint” that characterizes
its domains of investigation, “not through objec-
tive elements, but through definite laws.”17 For
Serres, this signalled the advent of a new type of
formalism or “global language,” a structural
formalism which in turn was to be imported
into philosophy as a new kind of analysis. In
this context, Serres’s doctoral thesis had two
interrelated objectives: (i) tracing the “archaeol-
ogy” of structuralism in Leibniz’s works, and in
doing so, (ii) reactivating Leibniz’s project of
systematicity to reflect on the transdisciplinary
or “interferential” condition of contemporary
science.18
pluralism of method
In line with Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s cri-
tique of epistemological metadiscursivity,
Serres argues that his structuralist approach is
not exogenous but already in germ in Leibniz’s
own scientific method. Contra Descartes’s
tabula rasa, Serres argues, Leibniz proceeded
through “establishments,” working through
patterns of suppositions established under
7
mercier
conditional certainty and opened to later dem-
onstration.19 “The Leibnizian coherence has
not much to do with irreversibility; on the con-
trary, among the multiple orders distributed per
combination, it comprises the rearrangement of
data, of conditions, of results, and retrospective
control.”20 On this account, Leibniz’s systemati-
city is not only made of multiple series of deduc-
tive paths (multilinearity) but its orders are
themselves multiple; they function as laws
through different regions of the system in an
analogical way (multivalence).21 This emphatic
use of the philosopher’s “order of reasons”
directly recalls Martial Gueroult, whose influ-
ence on Serres’s generation cannot be overesti-
mated.22 Developed from the 1950s onwards,
Gueroult’s “structuralist” method in the
history of philosophy consisted in privileging
the internal “order of reasons” of philosophical
systems over their authors’ intentions. Gueroult
“structures” were to be unravelled from the
works under scrutiny:
There are no general structures, but only
individualized ones, indissociable from the
contents that adhere to them: Platonic dialec-
tic, Aristotelian logic, Cartesian order of
reasons, Leibnizian combinatorics, Kant’s
transcendental method, dialectic of Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, etc. … Each philosophy
possesses, expressly or implicitly, its own dis-
course of method, which is tightly adjusted to
its specific meaning.23
In Gueroult’s vision of the history of philos-
ophy, each important philosophical system was
to be grasped as a singular “monument,” i.e.,
a nexus of necessary relationships that could
resist the test of time.
Like Gueroult, Serres’s System ̀ e de Leibniz
seeks to unravel Leibniz’s internal order of
reason, or general “architectonics,” starting
from combinatorial art.24 But unlike his prede-
cessor, Serres offers a spatializing interpret-
ation of this logical architectonics. “Order”
here alludes to a topological principle of conti-
guity as well as a principle of succession, an
objective rationale or “law” in the sense of a
“law of series.” Relying on Leibniz’s own con-
cepts of “scenography” and “ichnography,”25
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
Serres configures Leibniz’s system as a vast
network, which can be reconstructed starting
from various “scenographic” points of view or
“starred knots” (noeuds étoileś ):
In order to understand Leibnizian systemati-
city, we must construct a network and
attempt to constitute the map of the labyr-
inth; or better, two: that of “philosophical”
notions, and the network of reference, that
which constitutes the mathematical model –
to then reflect on their mutual relationships.
Each region of these networks is figured by a
kind of starred knot (or “summit”), of which
each thread […] crosses and joins all or part
of the whole of the other summits […]
Leibniz has always tended to multiply these
junctions and crossings, to relate each point
to all the others by the greatest number of
paths, or even all the possible paths: combi-
nation, composition, expression, conspira-
tion. (SL 14)
For Serres, the structure of models in Le
System̀ e de Leibniz is to Leibnizian systemati-
city like the contours of an image on tracing
paper, a precise rendering of its formal articula-
tions. Serres’s goal is to provide a bi-directional
proof of systematicity of Leibniz’s system, by
drawing the analogical maps of two exemplary
“regions” of its “Encyclopedia”: mathematics
and metaphysics. While the first part engages
us in a first voyage within Leibniz’s system start-
ing from two metaphysical theories – the theory
of representation and the theory of history – the
second part takes the opposite route, namely
from mathematical models to metaphysical pro-
blems. The exegesis of the Monadology is at the
centre of Serres’s project and it articulates the
two parts: as Serres reminds us on different
occasions, the system of pre-established
harmony is the “most elementary mesh of the
system” (SL 48), the cardinal point of intersec-
tion between mathematics and metaphysics.
Just as the human mind is conceived as a
“model” of divine nature, a “sample” (échantil-
lon) of it, each model constitutes an image of the
whole, a sample of systematicity. Through pre-
established harmony, the starred structure of
models “imitates, in the architectonics, the
worldly situation of the perceiving soul, it
expresses it under the aspect of method” (SL
100–01).
the dream and the archive
The special exemplarity conferred upom math-
ematical models poses a number of problems
that Serres resolved only partially in his doctoral
study. Mathematical models, Serres claims, do
not constitute the normative index of Leibniz’s
oeuvre but they have been chosen for their heur-
istic virtues and pedagogic character: mathemat-
ical models are “simplified elements of
comparison,” “more transparent, more evoca-
tive than other possible indexes” (SL 63). This
heuristic – rather than foundational – priority
of mathematics places Serres’s undertaking in
a position that is tangential to the tradition of
mathematical and logical readings of Leibniz.
On the one hand, his insistent stress on the sys-
tematic character of Leibniz’s oeuvre brings him
into the vicinity of the tradition which had con-
secrated Leibniz as the father of modern, i.e.,
formal, mathematics. Serres shares with the
interpretations of Couturat, Russell, Husserl,
and Bourbaki the theme of anticipation.26 For
him, Leibniz foresaw some of the discoveries
of modern mathematics, understood as its
most formal expressions (set theory, algebra,
topology). Like Couturat, he ascribes a promi-
nent role to the De Arte Combinatoria as the
seed and groundwork of Leibniz’s life-long
reflection on the science of forms as a general
science of relations. However, he recuses the
prevalence routinely ascribed to logics and the
related assumption of the derivative character
of metaphysics, encapsulated in Couturat’s
claim that “the metaphysics of Leibniz uniquely
relies on the principles of logics, and entirely
proceeds from them”27 or in Russell’s that
“[n]o candid reader of the ‘Opuscules’ can
doubt that Leibniz’s metaphysic was derived
by him from the subject–predicate logic.”28
Although he takes mathematical models as the
focal point of his demonstration, Serres is
adamant that mathematics is neither the ulti-
mate principle of explanation of Leibniz’s phil-
osophy nor the unique metalanguage of the
system. For Serres,
8

The danger is to follow the more mathema-
tico (understood in a univocal way) as if
Leibniz had realized a definitive presentation
in this way, or as if he had initially adopted
this method, yet nothing is falser; no text
establishes that without being contradicted
by another. (SL 29)
In the absence of a definitive keystone to Leib-
niz’s life-project, the mathesis universalis,
failing to reach completion, dispersed into a
multiplicity of “samples” (échantillons). In
fact, it is from his failure to find a single
logical plane of totalization and synthesis,
from his forced multivalence, that Serres’s
project unfolds. In other words, Serres inscribes
his research in the gap between Leibniz’s hope to
find a universal order and the system as it is
actually realized in Leibniz’s archive.
We do not consider the general organization,
as it should be in right, or as Leibniz some-
times hoped it, but as it is, in fact, realized.
The result seems in fact richer and more pro-
found that the “dream pursued.” (Ibid.)
In devising the commentary as a special kind of
network, Serres’s ambition is to reach the “geo-
metral” of all interpretations, claiming that we
can “harmonize” the major exegeses of Leibniz
(Couturat, Cassirer, Gueroult, Brunschvicg,
Baruzi, …) as different paths within one and
the same network. “[A] direct commentary of
the system that would not welcome all the
regional commentaries […] would not be of
Leibnizian spirit” (SL 26). Therefore, Serres’s
aim is not so much to offer a definitive interpret-
ation of the underlying structure of Leibniz’s
works as it is to articulate a pluralism of com-
possible exegetical models.
monadic multiplicities
In June 1968, to a doctoral jury composed of
George Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Yvon
Belaval, Suzanne Bachelard, and Roger
Martin, Serres would summarize his approach
in Le Système de Leibniz as neither a history
of philosophy nor a history of science but as
an attempt to “bring light onto a philosophy
for which the split between science and
9
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philosophy did not yet exist.”29 This concern
remains a constant one in Serres’s philosophy.
How can we read a work, for which the split
between philosophy and science has not yet
taken place? How shall we retrieve such a stand-
point? And, importantly, how does this stand-
point change the way we think of scientific
models in philosophy? As I will elucidate in
this section, the crux of his interpretation con-
sists in offering a translational account of Leib-
niz’s metaphysical system, which weaves the
mathematical and the metaphysical registers
tightly together.
Since Dietrich Mahnke’s unfinished Leibni-
zens Synthese von Universalmathematik und
Individualmetaphysik (1925), the relation
between Leibniz’s mathesis universalis and his
metaphysics of the individual has remained
one of the main conundrums for Leibniz scho-
larship. Going back to this question, Serres
asks: how can the real individual, “isolated
and foreclosed,” and the “relational universal,
of the mathematical type” (SL 528) find a syn-
thesis? Bridging that gap would amount to
reconciling the Leibnizs of antagonistic tra-
ditions: the logician seeking to discover a
language entirely transparent to itself, univer-
sally applicable, the Leibniz who created a
system made of a succession of tautologies,
and the baroque metaphysician of infinite com-
plexity and singular perspectives. This is all the
more difficult given that we cannot ignore the
importance of Leibniz’s distinction between
the mathematical domain, discernible with exac-
titude, and the metaphysical world of sub-
stances, the “real unity” of which remains out
of our reach. How, then, can mathematical
models reveal anything about the metaphysical
real? How are we to bridge this chasm? As we
will now see, Serres’s aim is not so much to
resolve the quandary as it is to display the struc-
tural relationship between mathematics and
metaphysics as two referential spaces (espaces
référentiels), crossing the mathematical per-
spectives on metaphysics and the metaphysical
perspectives on mathematics. It is at this junc-
tion that the concept of translation is intro-
duced, as a way of tracing the becoming of
specific concepts between distinct “languages”
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
(translation of forms) but also to thematize the
analogy between two “systematic states,” or
regions. According to Serres, Leibniz’s final
presentation of his metaphysical system, the
Monadology (1714), is the crystallizing point
of this translational relation; it thus functions
as a pivot for his analysis as a whole.
Before proceeding further, let us remark that
Serres’s interpretation of Leibniz’s Monadol-
ogy hinges decisively on his emphatic use of
the concept of multiplicity, which functions as
a general methodic given. In making such a
use of the concept of multiplicity, Serres
remains close to Georg Cantor’s own axiomatic
use of Mannigfaltigkeit as synonymous with
“set” (Menge), or “collection” (Inbegriff).
Serres regularly recalls this eminently technical
use of the concept:
The primitive is a term. Pluralism is not
initially an ontological decision, it is a
method; the argumentation concerning
unicity of being or its multiple dispersion is
clearly undecidable, or it dissimulates all
the attitudes we want, including political;
what remains is its operational character:
pluralism is a set strategy [une stratégie
ensembliste].30
Serres’s analysis of the Monadology holds a par-
ticular significance as it mirrors the structure of
the book as a whole, by constituting a mise en
abyme and primitive elucidation of the problem
of foundation. The ninety paragraphs of the Mon-
adology open on the problem of the co-depen-
dence of the one and the multiple, an opening
which for Serres not only describes but displays,
in a quasi-formal language, its principles.
§1 The Monad, of which we shall here speak,
is nothing but a simple substance, which
enters into composites. Simple, that is to
say, without parts.
§2 And there must be simple substances,
since there are composites; for the composite
is nothing but an accumulation or aggrega-
tum of simples.31
A monad is simple, thus undecomposable; it is
the absolute beginning (ontological beginning)
of Leibniz’s meditation (§1). Yet the Monad is
given to experience only through composition,
or aggregation: its phenomenal beginning is
that of the multiple (§2) (SL 294). As Serres
comments,
the aggregatum comes first insofar as it is
composed (a complexion) and in turn the
one comes first insofar as it is not composed.
Whether their essential definition or their
status of beginning is at stake, priority
belongs, in turn, according to the point of
view – ontological, phenomenal, constitutive
– to the monad, to the aggregatum, or to com-
position. (SL 295–96)
This double beginning entails that Leibniz’s
“formal or architectonic beginning” concerns
both the order of composition (one → multiple)
and that of reasons (multiple → one). There are
four orders in total (order of being, of phenom-
enon, of constitution, and of reasons), which
form a square of mutual priorities.32 What
becomes clear from the outset is that the
Monad is a metaphysical unit only insofar as it
constitutes a chiasma of orders, whereby each
beginning is immediately posited as relative.
Serres’s substitution of the metaphysics of foun-
dations for a problematic of modalities of order
is crucial insofar as it reorganizes it in a non-
linear fashion. In his reading, the Monadology
does not configure a metaphysics through a par-
ticular ontological decision but is rather the
space of deployment of the philosophical
problem of the one and the multiple.
The ontological question of multiplicity is
posed immediately in terms of relations
(between the one and the multiple and
between multiplicities) rather than in terms of
an absolute prioritization of one order over
another. For Serres, Leibniz’s concepts of
expression and perception both refer to distinct
relations between monadic multiplicities: whilst
expression designates the “connexion or adap-
tation of all created things to each and of each
to all” (§56), exemplifying the bi-directionality
of the one–multiple relation, Leibniz describes
perception as the representation of “a multi-
plicity in a unity” (§14). Following this lead,
Serres locates the Leibnizian Monad at the con-
vergence of two mirroring multiplicities: the
10

discrete multiplicity of the universe, exterior
and aggregative (§2), and the continuous multi-
plicity of perception, interior and intensive
(§13). As the “metaphysical requisite” of these
two types of multiplicity, the Monad is best
described as a structure of inversion: a monad
is closed and open, without windows but reflect-
ing the world, active and passive, spirit and
matter, primitive force and inertia.33 According
to Serres, the invention of the Monad
frees Leibniz from the labyrinthic difficulties
encountered by Plato, when addressing the
same problem in the hypotheses of the Parme-
nides by applying the region of the object and
the region of subjectivity one onto the other.
The One is indissolubly requisite of a cosmol-
ogy and centre of perception. (SL 298)
Leibniz’s “communication of the substances” is
intersubjective and interobjective at the same
time, and thereby constitutes what Serres theo-
rizes under the name of an “objective transcen-
dental” (transcendental objectif).34 It is in this
concept that Serres’s parallel research on the
theory of information and his work on Leibniz
find a natural point of convergence. Indeed,
both types of systematicity (cybernetic and
Leibnizian) lend themselves to a perspectivist
theory of knowledge that is free from any sub-
jective interiority. In other terms, they both
provide a theory of the condition of the limits
of knowledge (or rather the limits of ideas in
Leibniz, and the absolute quantification of infor-
mation in cybernetics) that lies outside the fra-
mework of transcendentalism.
translational metaphysics
Apart from examining an ideal distribution of
multiplicities and infinities, the text of the Mon-
adology is also held as a paramount example of
transdisciplinary or translational construction.
Serres’s brilliant idea is that the Monadology
or system of pre-established harmony is not
derived merely from a mathematical or scientific
invention but forms, in itself, a pluralistic struc-
ture of models. He first considers models taken
from classical mathematics (arithmetic, geome-
try, phoronomics), including combinatorics,
11
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which he considers, following Couturat, to be
an especially powerful template for Leibniz.
“Combinatorics is a Monadology with formal
monads” (SL 335). Serres considers the
seminal 1666 De Arte Combinatoria, subtitled
Logicae inventionis semina, as exemplary in
Leibniz’s elucidation of the “logic” proper to
invention. Written at the age of nineteen, the
De Arte indeed put forward that the integral
decomposition (into elements) and their re-com-
position was the keystone of a “general logic”
for the discovery and invention of true prop-
ositions.35 Insofar as it considers “any unities
(points, atoms, etc.), and multiplicities formed
through permutation, combination, arrange-
ment, without any other hypothesis on their
nature” (SL 332–33), combinatorial art opened
the path to an exploration in space of all the
possible relations between two multiplicities.
Yet this general art of multiplicities remains
only partial insofar as combinatorics (as all the
models taken from classical mathematics) can
only account for the combination of discrete
multiplicities, they can only “produce indiffer-
entiable elements or multiplicities” (SL 334)
but remain inadequate to think the concrete
world in its fullness and continuity. They
belong to what Leibniz calls “the logic of
imagination,” which, grounded in mathematical
logic, can only grasp empty forms, discontinu-
ous entities, and approximations.
Similarly, although they may seem closer to
the “real,” models taken from the experimental
sciences are no more conclusive. We know that
the discovery of animalcules, protozoans, and
bacteria by the Dutch scientist Antonie von
Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) was held by Leibniz
as an especially potent model as he considered
it an “eyewitness of his own thought” (SL
354). Yet, by showing that the infra-world was
perpetually moving, full and in transformation,
the observation of “infinitesimal animals” con-
stituted not so much a ground for his metaphy-
sics as an experimental illustration, an image of
his philosophical system, the “transfer of the
general precepts of the art of thinking in the
domain of living reality” (SL 355, 361). As
Serres shows, what enables such a transfer is
not the empiricist presupposition linking the
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
theoretical to the observable but the use of the
principle of harmony as “regulative idea”: the
discovery of a single structure across the math-
ematical and organic orders. In fact, Leibniz
radicalized Leeuwenhoek’s finding of “thou-
sands and thousands of living creatures, seen
live in a small drop of water” (SL 358) by iterat-
ing it ad infinitum into a metaphysics of infinite
encasing (emboîtements). His metaphysical
world is composed not only of an infinity of
elements but also of an infinity of orders of
existence: this world is “everywhere mechanical,
everywhere organic, everywhere animated,
everywhere spiritual […]” (SL 364). Since the
monadological world is entirely filled up, yet
diverse and discernible, since it proceeds by
continuous and gradual changes, it cannot be
intuited directly. At the limit of exteriority
and interiority the monadological world can be
grasped only by moving between different epis-
temological registers. Serres argues that, for
Leibniz, the fullness of nature could only be
modelled upon mathematics of the infinite
such as the theories of “rational, irrational and
transcendental numbers” (SL 343), by “super-
position of geometries” (Euclidian, analytical,
projective, analysis situs), or by totalization of
different models (SL 351). Passing through a
multitude of models without being completely
grasped by any of them, the “real” metaphysical
world only emerges as the horizon towards
which several scientific languages converge:
Thus, the pure meditation on the one and the
multiple, analysis and composition, can be
translated in several positive languages;
the arithmetic language designates the
numeral version of pure multiplicity and
the operational version of formal liaisons;
geometric language exhibits the extensive
translation of this multiple and grasps these
liaisons as transformations; as well as the
different languages of mechanics, biology,
logic (etc.), do in their own semantic
domain, playing the role of positive
languages, effectively spoken in the diverse
regions of knowledge, in the diverse
countries of the Encyclopedia. Therefore,
the language that metaphysics speaks, that
of the Monadology, is precisely the universal
language, from which all the others are only
particular projections in singular domains,
epistemologically assignable; it expresses, in
fact, all their syntaxes and all their semantics
at the same time; it even allows to consider
them as respective translations from
another […] And thus, we consider that the
Leibnizian project to form a language that
obeys the norms that we have just enounced
– everywhere considered as a dream – has
succeeded: the Monadology is written in
this very language. (SL 392)
Serres considers that the Monadology’s
primary function is not to describe the substan-
tial world but to “express, in universal language,
the construction of a world that reflects itself in
all the regions of the Encyclopedia.” Therefore,
the monad does not designate the monument to
solipsism that the tradition retained but that
element which is “discovered at the end of a
structural generalisation” (SL 367; emphasis
mine). Following Serres’s constructivist stance,
a metaphysical description is that which is suc-
cessively traversed by all the languages that
“speak” it from their own regional perspectives.
In this sense, there is no precedence of metaphy-
sics over epistemology but only a system of
crossed priorities between the order of
“method” and the order of the “real.” Put
another way, there is no metaphysical discovery
without variation or variability.36 By relying on
Leibniz’s principle of harmony, Serres carefully
distinguishes this view from a relativism, by
maintaining the possibility – albeit as remote as
a “point at infinity” in projective geometry – of
an objective totalization of perspectives. Neither
global nor local, the universal can appear only
through the juxtaposition of systems of refer-
ence: “truth emerges from the short-circuiting
of two or several linguistic ensembles, from
which identity springs” (SL 539).
analogy and metabasis
To characterize the passage from mathematics
to metaphysics and from “universal mathemat-
ics” to the “metaphysics of the individual” as
a translational variation entails that no given
language or single discipline can suffice, per
se, to describe the whole system. At the same
12

time, “each reference is totally explicatory, each
model is faithful […] one language [langue] suf-
fices without a dictionary to translate it into
another” (SL 520). Orders are “parallel and
imbricated,” “there is totalization at the same
time as erasing of the other orders” (SL 521).
Here, Serres calls strategically on the notions
of language and translation to grasp the com-
plete referential autonomy of each system of
explanation, and yet their relative insufficiency,
in relation to the metaphysical whole.
Through the notion of language, Serres intro-
duces differenciation in a theoretical space that
remains otherwise epistemologically homo-
geneous, reading Leibniz’s famous “continuous
ocean of the sciences” from the retrospective
standpoint of transdisciplinarity or interfer-
ence.37 By the same token, he sheds light on a
much overlooked form of systematicity, that
which Aristotelianism has repressed since the
enigmatic critique of homonymy in the Cat-
egories. Since this semantic interpretation of
the Monadology is grounded on the idea of
translational variation as a form of approxi-
mation, it explains the essential multivalence
of certain key mathematical and metaphysical
concepts such as that of the point:38
The point is not incompatible with the
monad: on the contrary, once appropriately
enriched, this image of a centre or point of
view will be reiterated a hundred times; but
in its purely geometrical state, it is too
distant an image, too approximative […] It
is a term in the variation. (SL 340)
Serres refers to this illuminating quotation by
Leibniz:
Formerly, when my philosophy was not
really ripe, I located the Souls in points,
and I thought that their multiplication was
explicable by Translation, since from a
single point one can produce a multiplicity
of them, just as from the summit of a triangle
one can produce by division, the summits of a
multiplicity of triangles. But I became more
circumspect … thinking that in this there
was a sort of μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [tran-
sition to another species]. […] To say that
souls are intelligent points is not exact
13
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enough an expression. If I talk about them
as centres or concentrations of external
things, I speak by analogy.39
Against the Aristotelian prohibition of metaba-
sis, Serres’s interpretation of the Monadology
reconfigures analogy as a positive feature of
the system. While it is generally agreed upon
that Leibniz relied on analogy as a “pivotal
tool for the discovery of mathematical truths
and the progress of formal knowledge,”40 the
crucial wager of Serres’s doctoral dissertation
is to systematize Leibniz’s analogical apparatus
by drawing on its epistemological autonomy
vis-à-vis the regions, theoretical worlds, and
languages it connects.41 Although distinct con-
cepts, “analogy” and “expression” thus
perform a similar role as they both bridge the
mathematical and the metaphysical and
thereby assume a structural function in
Serres’s general architectonic of systematicity.
As Serres puts it, the “general theory of corre-
spondences” is the “organon of method” of
the system (SL 407). This recasting of analogy
is what enables him to move from a plurality
of epistemological languages to the System of
Leibniz, presenting the articulation between
mathematics and metaphysics as a translational
equivalence between parallel and self-sufficient
languages. The pivotal importance of this auton-
omization of expression and analogy in Serres’s
works can be gleaned from his Hermes̀ volumes
(1968–80), the titles of which would focus on the
epistemological-methodological relations that
emerged from his reading of Leibniz (“com-
munication,” “interference,” “translation,”
and “distribution”). These categories all consti-
tuted crossovers between a Leibnizian structur-
alism and his project – crucially inflected by
the theory and physics of information – of devis-
ing a general epistemology of networks, a
project which would be taken up by Callon
and Latour in their “sociology of translation”
or actor-network theory.42
I have shown that Serres addresses Leibniz’s
“systematicity” as a network of mathematical
models and metaphysical theses. In doing so,
he aims to reconstruct Leibniz’s philosophy as
a space of combinatorial interplay, rather than
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
dividing Leibnizianism into a set of more or less
pertinent “positions” in the history of philos-
ophy, or following its genetic constitution
through chronology. He thus privileges the
complication of the Leibnizian scientific uni-
verse, its synthetic drive, over the step-by-step
history of its constitution. Such a network, I
have also claimed, relies on demonstrating a
structural analogy between the mathematical
and the metaphysical planes in Leibniz’s philos-
ophy. Before concluding, it is worth emphasiz-
ing that this reading of expressive relations
(specified as analogy, as isomorphisms, trans-
lations, correspondences) as an architectonic
keystone of Serres’s demonstration of systemati-
city is a double-edged sword. On the one hand,
Serres’s insistence on the relational systemati-
city of variation rather than on the historical
variations of the system tends to fixate Leibniz’s
metaphysics in a synchronic image. The
expression “Monadological metaphysics,” as
well as the seamless passages between The Mon-
adology (the book) and the Monadology (the
essence or structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics),
registers such fixation.43 On Serres’s account,
Leibniz’s metaphysics was already preformed,
in germ, in the combinatorial model: “In the
De Art Combinatoria, the system is finished
for the first time […] in the Monadology, it is
completed, by saturation of regional meanings
and philosophical meaning. But it is the same
(system), with a different content” (SL 636).
Several scholars have since contested the val-
idity of Serres’s systemic approach. Michel
Fichant, in particular, argues that “the sup-
posed equivalence between the concepts of indi-
vidual substance and of monad was one of the
interpretive conditions of the reconstruction of
a ‘System of Leibniz’ ideally closed and sub-
tracted from the effective duration of
genesis.”44 Locating each of these pivotal
notions (“substantial form,” “individual sub-
stance,” “monad”) within its precise context of
emergence, Fichant contests that they can be
viewed as analogical terms, highlighting the
discrepancy between the problematics they
each partake in. Against Serres’s spatializing
gesture, Fichant contends that we cannot grasp
the thrust of Leibniz’s metaphysical invention
without accounting for these discontinuities in
the “system” and in the chronology.
Furthermore, Serres’s endeavour can be criti-
cized for simply positing what it is supposed to
prove. If the “system” consists of a formal
apparatus (an axiomatics) of analogical relations
posited at the outset, where, exactly, does the
burden of the proof of systematicity of Leibni-
zianism fall? For Serres’s structural reading to
be valid, a certain level of coherence must be
presupposed: at bottom a formalism of multipli-
cities operates as a plane of general translatabil-
ity. Indeed, Serres’s undertaking remains
ambiguously dependent on a Leibnizian prin-
ciple of harmonic pre-establishment: the
“system of harmony” or Monadology needs to
function as an empty structure of universality
(i.e., a generalized one-multiple relationality),
because it is the only guarantee of the existence
of such a structure. Furthermore, the structural
systematization rests on the Bourbakian version
of the “architecture of mathematics,” a set-
theoretical language which, as Serres knew,
was already outdated in the late 1960s.45 In
this sense, Serres’s demonstration of systemati-
city depends on a presupposition of coherence at
a formal level that is never fully explicated.46
This, however, does not hinder the funda-
mental advantage of Serres’s relational focus:
to forgo the debate over which of these orders
– mathematical, metaphysical, theological, or
other – has priority. Serres adopts the very per-
spective of Leibniz’s general systematic aim, and
introduces us into the “unconscious” of Leib-
niz’s science (and through him, of the “Classical
Age”): relations between concepts and geometri-
cal schemas, isomorphisms between mathemat-
ical demonstrations and philosophical theses.
He consistently looks for the points at which
Leibniz’s translational exercises become a form
of philosophical invention. This is the opposite
of a static structure, often reproached to struc-
turalism. Indeed, Serres’s systematicity is a
dynamic principle of structural unity, composed
of an ensemble of overlapping and unfinished
universal “projects” (combinatorics, universal
characteristics, universal language, universal
mathematics, general science and the Encyclo-
pedia). Generalizing Leibniz’s method of
14

establishments, Serres inscribes Leibniz’s phil-
osophy in the future-oriented temporality of
invention and correlates the different samples
of Leibniz’s works from the standpoint of this
prospection.
By moving onto a general theory of multipli-
cities, Serres situates his reading on a plane
that is more fundamental than either math-
ematics or logic since it depends on a second-
order formalism: a system of systems, the sys-
tematicity of which is not ruled by pure equiv-
alence or tautology (as in formal logic) but
draws on multiple variations on identity (corre-
spondence, isomorphism, translation, etc.).
Ideally, such “systematicity” would thus recon-
cile formal systems (symbolic languages) with
systems of forms (or morphologies).47 Tackling
the forefather of the logicist tradition, Serres
doubles the axiomatic system with a language
of forms that is not encapsulated through
deduction and predication. He thus brings
our attention to analogy as the exact point at
which a certain tradition, to preserve its own
coherence, had to resolve the Leibnizian
indeterminacy.
coda: minimalism vs. maximalism
One of the most persistent interrogations about
the concept of structure concerns the nature of
the difference, the rapport or relation that separ-
ates and unites its elements, joining them in
their difference.48 How does Serres’s structural
reading of the Monadology intervene in the
debate on structure? We have seen that
Serres’s Leibnizian structuralism of expression
was set apart from the entire post-Saussurean
trajectory insofar as it is methodologically
detached from natural language. What are the
consequences of this turn to formal languages
on the concept of structure? To grasp some of
the specificities of Serres’s approach it is
useful to go back to Jean-Claude Milner’s “nor-
mative” account of structure. According to
Milner, insofar as all elements are defined only
through their differential relations, the
concept of structure derived from Saussure
remains per se indefinable, it functions only as
a given, it is posited as irreducible:
15
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In structuralism, one gives oneself the
concept of structure; the latter thus functions
as an undefinable. The attempts of direct
definition that one can cite are immensely
banal; this is not owed to an insufficiency
on the part of the authors, but to an error
of conception: structure, in the programme
of research that featured it as its axiom,
does not let itself be defined; one can at
most or at least, show how it functions.49
As Milner argues further, there is no difference
between the concept of structure and that of
element; they are one and the same concept
but expressed under different aspects. As a con-
sequence, Milner considers set theory to be fun-
damentally the obverse of structuralism:
The structure is the element and the element
is the structure. It is a symmetrical relation
(just as the relation that is internal to the
two facets of the Saussurian sign). This
measures the distance between structuralism
and Bourbakism – and all the mathematical
uses of the term “structure.” Not because
of any insufficiency, but for a fundamental
reason: between structure and element, any
set-type hierarchy [hiérarchie du type ensem-
bliste] must be put aside. Although theoreti-
cians do use the words “ensemble” and
“element”, the most certain way of failing
to grasp structuralism is to proceed via set
theory. Strictly speaking, the element of the
structure does not belong to the structure:
the asymmetrical relation of belonging has
no pertinence.50
For Milner, the element does not belong to the
structure but is the structure. Different struc-
tures cannot be considered simultaneously for
they form their own separate universe each
time. In phonology, for instance, the ensemble
of distinctive oppositions in a given language
cannot function as an absolute reference;
although the distinction between phonemes
obeys the same law of opposition in English
and French, the values of these opposition are
each time specific to a particular phonological
system. “The absence of absolute phonological
reference [référentiel] entails the absence of
phonological simultaneity.” There is no “struc-
ture in itself” from which to start in order to
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
“construct simultaneities between independent
systems.”51 According to Milner, this is the
crux of the distinction between structuralism
and formalism: whilst structuralism only ever
considers one structural order at once, formal-
ism posits a homomorphy; it depends funda-
mentally on systemic simultaneity. On this
ground, Milner excludes Serres’s approach,
alongside the late Lévi-Strauss’s and
Dumézil’s, from structuralism proper, consider-
ing that their “formalism” or “transforma-
tional” structuralism is antithetic to the
principle of epistemological minimalism.
Inversely, systematic simultaneity is what
defines Serres’s structural inquiry in essence;
his expressionism reformulates structuralism
as a logic of transdisciplinarity, thus as a move-
ment between parallel disciplinary languages. In
Serres’s conception, as in Georges Dumézil’s, a
structure is obtained through isomorphisms, or
homologies across different regional languages.
Strata of analysis constitute variations of one
another, just as different languages translate
into one another.52 In Le Système de Leibniz,
these strata, these languages, are immanently
related to one another through the principle of
harmony, the harmonic relationships of the
one and the multiple: “What is the System? It
is an ensemble of theses, substitutable or trans-
latable, salva veritate. The truth of harmonic
relations between the one and the multiple tra-
verses the distance from the formal to the
real” (SL 536).
In Serres’s Leibnizian structuralism, each
unit is a reflection of a multiplicity in a unity;
it is one insofar as it encloses a totality. The
peculiar logic of the sign is thus replicated in
the expressive relationship of the monad with
the universe. Like a sign in the langue or an
element in a combinatorial table, each monad
is endowed with a singular perspective on the
totality, and it is constituted by it. In this
sense, Serres unravels the proto-semiological
logic encapsulated in Leibniz’s system of pre-
established harmony as a “logic of
expression.”53 He does so by thinking together
homological types of relationality (expression,
translation, communication, analogy, corre-
spondence, etc.) and by considering different
regional systematic states in their simultaneity.
Rather than excluding each other, it is my con-
tention that the two logics of structure deli-
neated by Milner (mathematical and
semiological) coexist in Serres’s Leibnizian
structuralism.
Whilst the Saussurean sign and structural
phonology are ontologically minimalist by
positing difference as the only form of indivi-
duation (thus revoking the perennial dichotomy
of individualism vs. holism),54 Serres points
towards another face of structuralism, that is,
the ontological maximalism of relational meta-
physics. If entities are essentially defined
through their relations with one another there
is no a priori limit to the range of “networks,”
to the ontological organization and reorganiz-
ation of these relations, or to the “modes of
existence” of the networks under consideration.
In Serres’s conception, there could be an infi-
nite number of metalanguages for the system.
Serres’s maximalism takes on meaning when
we consider not one but several structuralist
projects alongside one another, without, like
Milner, establishing the trajectory leading
from Saussure to Lacan as its exclusive norm.
Indeed, as other key texts of his generation
(especially Foucault’s The Order of Things
and Derrida’s On Grammatology), Le
System̀ e de Leibniz is not so much predicated
on a unique concept of structure as it contains
a reflective commentary on structuralism as
an epistemological event; an event which was
concerned primarily with the redefinition of
disciplinarity and the more general “crisis of
referential”55 brought about by the return of
language as antinomic foundation of the
sciences, human and exact.
To conclude, reading Le System ̀ e de Leibniz
sheds light on a rationalist genealogy of struc-
turalism which, unlike Peden’s Spinozist path,
does not lead to an immanent structuralism à
la Althusser and Deleuze (and Milner) but
instead to a multivalent structuralism closer
to a generalized systems-theory. The fact that
this other type of structuralism did not rely on
Saussurean linguistics explains why, despite
the anti-structuralist turn of the 1970s, it
enjoyed a longer life – and recent afterlife, at
16

the crossroads of philosophy and anthropology.
We can think of experiments such as Lévi-
Strauss’s late “structuralism of transform-
ations” but also, closer to us, of works such as
those of Bruno Latour or Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, for whom the continued relevance of
structuralism lies primarily in its generalized
perspectivism or what Serres would have called
a “pluralism in rigour.” Thus in devising his
Leibnizian structuralism, Serres developed a
powerful model of translational, transdisciplin-
ary or transregional perspectivism, and one
which has reappeared continuously, under
different guises, since. Whether these more
recent versions of transregional
perspectivism can be entirely
exempted from acknowledging
the formal “structure of
models” that underpins them
remains an open question.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
This article is one of the outcomes of a Postdoc-
toral Fellowship granted by the Centre for
Research in Modern European Philosophy at King-
ston University (“The Crisis of Reference: Serres
and Foucault between Formalism and History,”
2016–18). I am grateful to those who offered
their comments on earlier drafts of this article or
whose critical insights helped me in some key
stages of the research process, especially to the
late Michel Serres, with whom I had the chance
to discuss some of the issues addressed here:
Eric Alliez, Etienne Balibar, Valérie Debuiche,
Bernard Dyonisius Geoghegan, Jean-Claude
Milner, Peter Osborne, Tzuchien Tho, as well as
the anonymous author of a brutal but meticulous
review for a well-known history of philosophy
journal.
1 Serres, Hermès IV, La Distribution 275; translation
mine. All translations from the French are mine
unless specified otherwise.
2 See Mercier, “Mathematical Anamneses.”
17
mercier
3 Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles math-
ématiques. Étoiles–schémas–points. Hereafter SL.
4 Robinet 63.
5 Peden 5–6.
6 Maniglier, La Vie 15–16.
7 The word “methodic” translates “méthodique.”
It is a pivotal notion in Michel Serres’s early
works, and it encapsulates Serres’s refusal of epis-
temological distance between method and object.
Unlike a “methodological” protocol, following a
methodic path means unfolding the method that
is immanent to the object under scrutiny. Addition-
ally, for Serres, “method” designates a form of
transport or a relation between two points.
Serres often returns to the image of the etymologi-
cal image associated with this notion (hodos: path,
way, way of access).
8 When Foucault was working on The Order of
Things, he had regular conversations with Serres
in Clermont-Ferrand. Serres claims that some of
the ideas developed in Foucault’s book had
emerged from their discussions. See, in particular,
Serres and Latour 37–38.
9 Geoghegan 98.
10 Written in 1961, this article would
be published only in 1967 as “Analyse
symbolique et méthode structurale,” Revue philo-
sophique de la France et de l’étranger 4 (1967):
437–52.
11 Serres, “Structure et importation: des mathé-
matiques aux mythes” in Hermès I, La Communi-
cation 22.
12 Ibid. 32.
13 See Deleuze “How do we Recognize
Structuralism?” 170–92; Rabouin, “Structuralisme”
42.
14 On the critique of the “overbearing” position-
ing of philosophy with regard to science, see
Serres, “Transdisciplinarity” 37–44.
15 Bourbaki 221–32.
16 Serres, Hermès I 58.
17 Ibid.
18 This is developed at length in Serres’s thèse doc-
torale mineure [secondary doctoral thesis], titled
Essai sur le concept épistémologique d’interférence,
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
which was later published as Hermès II,
L’Interférence.
19 “J’appelle établissement lorsqu’on détermine
et achève au moins certains points, et met cer-
taines thèses hors de dispute, pour gagner du
terrain et pour avoir des fondements, sur les-
quels on peut bâtir. C’est proprement la
méthode des mathématiciens.” (“I call Establish-
ment when we determine and achieve at least
certain points, and set certain theses out of
dispute, in order to gain terrain and have
some foundations upon which we can
build. This is the proper method of mathemati-
cians.”) Die Philosophischen Schriften von
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. K.I. Gerhardt
(Berlin: Weidman, 1875–90) 2: 192; translation
mine.
20 Serres, SL 21.
21 The contrast between the Cartesian chain of
deduction and Leibniz’s method of establishment
uncovers a field of inquiry which would otherwise
be illegible: it exposes a Leibnizian “discourse on
method,” holding together what remains other-
wise scattered across various essays on ideas,
“symbolic thought,” “universal mathematics,” or
the “art of invention.”
22 See, in particular, Giuseppe Bianco, “Philoso-
phie et histoire de la philosophie pendant les
années 1950. Le cas du jeune Gilles Deleuze” in
L’Angle mort. Philosophie et sciences humaines en
France pendant les années 1950.
23 Gueroult. Leçon inaugurale 34.
24 In his 1989 account of the state of research
on Leibniz, Albert Heinekamp grouped
Gueroult and Serres together under the
heading of “structural interpretations” but did
not reflect further on the differences
between their approaches. See Heinekamp,
“L’État actuel de la recherche leibnizienne”
154–56.
25 “The difference between the appearance of
bodies with respect to us and with respect to
God is in some way like the difference between
a drawing in perspective (scenographia) and a
ground plan (ichnographia).” Leibniz to Des
Bosses (15 February 1712), The Leibniz–Des
Bosses Correspondence, trans. and eds. B.C. Look
and D. Rutherford (New Haven and London:
Yale UP, 2007) 232–33.
26 See, for instance, SL 554–55 n. 1. To this
list, one crucial name should be added:
Norbert Wiener. Following the latter, Serres
considers Leibniz to be the forefather of the
general theory of communications or
cybernetics.
27 Couturat x.
28 Russell xiii.
29 Canguilhem, “Rapport.”
30 Serres, Hermès III, La Traduction 113; emphasis
mine.
31 Leibniz, The Monadology 217. Translation
amended on the grounds of Leibniz: Principes de
la nature 69.
32 Gilles Deleuze provided his own diagram for
this square of priorities in The Fold 127.
33 SL 385. This structure of inversion is grasped
in its greatest arithmetic and spatial purity in
Leibniz’s harmonic triangle, probably the most
potent of all the mathematical models, to which
Serres came back in his “Système et synthèse”
in Hermès III, La Traduction 120–33. I have repro-
duced the schema included in the latter (128)
below. Serres shows that in the course of his
mathematical researches, Leibniz transformed
Pascal’s arithmetical triangle by redoubling it,
starting from its summit, with its mirroring
image in fractions. On the one hand, Serres con-
tends that Leibniz’s harmonic triangle constitutes
a literal figuration of the mathesis, by representing
a complete, well-saturated, beautiful, hence har-
monic, multiplicity. All numbers are different
from one another, yet each of them has a
relation to the whole, since its very position on
the net contains the whole definition. It is made
of an “order of orders, like a space-time”
(129). On the other hand, the harmonic triangle
can be interpreted as an image of the monad: we
can draw a horizontal line in its middle, which
figures a limit and a harmonic connexion.
Whilst the numbers mirror one another, as in
the series of the soul and the body, the limit
also stands for the monad itself, which figures
the limit between exteriority (the communication
of all substances in the order of the cosmos) and
the internal infinite perceptions that mirror the
latter. Through this figural translation from the
mathesis to the monad, Serres writes, “the har-
monic connexion of the soul and the body, of
18

the individual and the world” is “explicated,
which means unfolded into sequences of simplici-
ties” (131).
34 On this topic, see Crahay.
35 Pelletier 276.
36 On the concept of variation, see Patrice
Maniglier’s developments in “La Vérité des
autres” 463–78.
37 See Mercier, “Introduction” 37–40.
38 Martial Gueroult had already made a compel-
ling analysis of the multiple types of “space,”
“point,” and “void” at stake in Leibniz (exten-
sum; qualitas extensa; extensio; spatium), which
probably inspired Serres’s own reflection on
the manifold meaning of the “point” in the
third part of Le Système de Leibniz. See Gueroult,
“L’Espace.”
39 Leibniz, Textes inédits 372 qtd in Serres, SL
759.
40 Leduc 337. Leduc develops a convincing
defence of the epistemological autonomy of
the concept of analogy in Leibniz’s works, as well
as a critique of Nicolas Rescher’s more restrictive
view.
41 The contrast between Serres’s account and
more cautious and limited analyses of Leibniz’s
mathematical models of “expression,” such as
Valérie Debuiche’s (“L’Expression leibnizienne et
ses modèles mathématiques”), is helpful to
measure the effects of Serres’s structural method-
ology on his interpretation of Leibniz.
42 See Akrich, Callon, and Latour.
43 Mogens Laerke has recently criticized Serres
for his reliance on the 1714 Monadology as “a
highly compressed summary of a ‘monadological
metaphysics’ that permeates all of Leibniz’s philo-
sophical writings,” an ahistorical conception of
Leibniz’s metaphysics which was embraced
19
mercier
uncritically by Deleuze, who was admirative of
Serres’s book. See Laerke 1196.
44 Fichant, “L’Invention” 78–79.
45 In a footnote, Serres remarks: “several signs
show us that the unification realized by the
‘moderns’ is once again at the stage to be overtaken
and that mathematics is going back to diversification”
(SL 85 n. 2). David Rabouin has emphasized the diffi-
culty of grounding structuralism on Bourbaki’s defi-
nition of Mother structures (algebraic, order
structure or topological structure). Indeed, by the
time this mathematical model was taken up in the
social sciences and philosophy (1950s–1960s) it had
already lost much of its relevance in mathematics.
But there was a similar delay in mathematics:
although the Bourbakian project of structural unifica-
tion of mathematics was proven out of date with the
emergence of category theory in 1945, the 1930s
programme of unification of mathematics through a
set-theoretical “foundational” framework continued
to be pursued until the 1970s. See Rabouin, “Struc-
turalisme” 44–57.
46 One of the most illuminating criticisms of
Serres’s use of the concept of “system” in his
reading of Leibniz is to be found in David Rabouin’s
works. See, in particular, Rabouin, “Logique.”
47 Responding to a question regarding his concept
of structure during his doctoral exam, Serres
explained that he took “structure” both in the clas-
sical sense of anatomy and in the modern, math-
ematical sense. As he put it elsewhere, the term
refers both to its traditional sense of construction
or organization, when speaking of bodies (inert or
living), and to an axiomatics (Canguilhem,
“Rapport”). This dual nature of the Leibnizian
system is the topic of a later article, in which
Serres draws a series of new conclusions from
the results of his doctoral work: “Leibniz retraduit
en language mathématique” in Hermès III, La Traduc-
tion 111–20.
48 See, in particular, Malabou.
49 Milner, Le Périple 212–13.
50 Ibid. 214.
51 Milner, “Forme” 137.
52 Milner suggests that we characterize Dumézil’s
proposition as “structurism” (a term that Dumézil
himself invented) rather than “structuralism” (ibid.
131).
 serres’s leibnizian structuralism
53 It is, of course, Gilles Deleuze who explores this
affinity in great detail by defining structuralism as a
general “logic of relations” and exploring Leibnizian-
ism from the standpoint of a single mathematical
model: the differential calculus.
54 See Balibar, “Structuralism” 17–22.
55 For Serres, “Crisis of referential” means the
“loss of a fixed point,” a crucial feature of Classical
science that he explores in the third part of Le
Système de Leibniz. This directly resonates with
the “interferential” condition of the contemporary
sciences, namely that of an “epistemology without
cardinal points.” Cf. Hermès II, L’Interférence.
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