Serres argues that the Age of Enlightenment was very instrumental in categorizing as irrational any reason not formed by science. He holds the Enlightenment responsible for the split between literature and science, which favors a definition of rationality supported exclusively by scientific research. The epistemological rupture between literature and science took place in the eighteenth century, which sought to label as irrational anything that was not science. In other words, science aimed at taking over the totality of reason relegating literature to the irrational or the imaginary. But as he states:
I maintain that there is as much reason in the works of Montaigne or Verlaine as there is in physics or biochemistry and, reciprocally, that often there is as much unreason scattered through the sciences as there is in certain dreams. Reason is statistically distributed everywhere; no one can claim exclusive rights to it (Serres, 1995b, p. 50).
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"Serres' passionate skepticism and rejection of the traditional French philosophy of Critique—the rational separation between nature and culture in the line of Descartes, Marx, and Sartre (see Latour, 1988;Wesling, 1996)—have been condemned both by postmodernists and traditional empiricists. <strong>Katherine Hayles says that Serres is confused and needs a logic lesson; Luc Ferry writes that Serres is a dangerous prophet who might unite with other mystagogues, get power, and overturn the order of modernity; Jean Baudrillard, one of Serres' fiercest critics, argues that Serres should be almost admired as a small morbid symptom of a doom to be welcomed (Wesling, 1996, p. 1999)</strong>"
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