Technophany Vol.2 No.2 ©Author(s), 2023. Corresponding author: ©Research Network for Philosophy and Technology ISSN 2773-0875 Entropy’s Critical Translations: Following Serres’s Path through the North-West-Passage Lilian Kroth Abstract: It is, according to Serres, the “greatest discovery of history that entropy and information are connected”—a line of thought he pursues throughout epistemological questions, aesthetics, cultural analysis, and a theory of differential mattering. By following Serres’s work, one finds negentropy, entropy, chaos, local orders, the “soft,” and the “hard” almost everywhere in his writings. The intellectual context and sources that Serres draws on are an important support in understanding the coupling of informational and thermodynamic entropy, and how it becomes a key operator of entropic differentiation. This text draws a combinatorial map of how Serres connects entropies across a range of areas of knowledge. In this specific context, Serres’s path of translation harnesses the so-called “hard” and the “soft” forms of entropy in his investigations of literature and art, but also in order to discuss social phenomena and the formations of societies. By drawing attention to the negative spaces in Serres’s connective path of translating entropies and in the course of reading his work in context with other philosophies of entropy, this essay aims to explore Serres’s translations in the way it both connects and leaves gaps . Approaching Serres’s criticality in this way brings one to the critical, difficult, icy landscapes of the North-West-Passage. The North-West-Passage epitomises a method to conceive the difficult path between the natural sciences and the humanities—exactly the kind of path that entropy often meanders on. In fact, entropy itself plays an important role regarding the icy landscape’s ecology, e.g., to the degree to which the passage is melted or frozen, and thus, to the possibility of the passage as such. Bringing these lines of thought together, entropy appears as a condition to think Serres’s method of translation. By considering these multi-layered aspects of entropy as a material, aesthetic, and critical factor, this contribution places Serres’s approach to entropy as an eco-critical path in the face of the melting of icy landscapes. Keywords: entropy, Serres, North-West-Passage, translation, transdisciplinary, environment Lilian Kroth, lvlk2@cam.ac.uk