Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken
by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Sens
es Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian t
radition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically,
the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The frag
ile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, i
s disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society a
nd information technology.
Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less in
terested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's lab
el. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our sen
ses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could? The book won
the inaugural Prix Medicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an in
troduction by Steven Connor.
