• He wrote and gave interviews in French, and he avoided promotional branding.
• In the academic world, Serres did not fit into any niche and his transdisciplinary approach initially caused consternation.
• Paradoxically however, as time went on, he still became lumped together with French intellectuals who had a reputation for presenting ‘difficult’ if not almost impenetrable theoretical thought.
• He was a ‘jack of all trades’ and considered this diversity and breadth marked out humankind.
• Perhaps most of all, he resisted comfortable solutions and selling his ideas through the popular academic treadmill. He suggested one main reason for the neglect of his work:

I’m not a specialist in any field or any problem. But above all, because no concept is attached to my name. I don’t have the equivalent of that idea that is attached to the names of certain philosophers as their discovery … I have no logo, no brand. Now, a philosophy only spreads if it has a logo.

Pantopie: de Hermès à petite poucette (Serres 2014)

Serres is particularly scathing about contemporary philosophy in the French language which he labelled a philosophy of exclusion. Against the grain of much recent scholarship that unsettles human-centred thinking, Serres is provocative in reclaiming the ideas of a ‘grand narrative’, the ‘universal’ and the project of ‘humanism’. Such words will raise the hackles of many, and his philosophy quickly dismissed as totally out-dated. Serres recognised how these terms had been abused, for example, noting that the word ‘universal’ is difficult to disassociate from links with imperialism’. His universalism is tangible, anchored in the earth and all life. Humanism for Serres is the process of growing towards the universal through the recognition of everything that we have in common with all life forms and the inert world. Humanism has never existed; it has to be invented.

Serres decentres the human through the shared recognition of the universal.