Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple

Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple

Starobinski, Jean
Hawkes, Sophie
Fort, Jeff

Hardcover

PhilosophyLinguisticsGeneral World History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 189095120X
ISBN13: 9781890951207
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: Mar 6 2003
Pages: 480
Weight: 2.00
Height: 1.70 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

A wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conceptual history of the changing meanings and metaphors of action and reaction

What is meant by reactionary politics? What do biologists mean when they speak of the interaction between life and its surroundings? Why was the term abreaction invented and later abandoned by the first generation of psychoanalysts? These are but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar Jean Starobinski answers in his latest work on the conceptual history of the words action and reaction.

Not just a history of ideas, Action and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a literary history, a history of medicine, and a history of the biological sciences. Concentrating especially on the moment when scientific language and ordinary language diverge, the author offers a genealogy of the human and natural sciences through their usage of the metaphors action and reaction.

Newton's theorem to every action an equal action is always opposed, stands as a point of departure for Starobinski's exploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces this proposition left in its wake. With stunning clarity, the author analyzes the scientific, literary, and political effects of the terms action / reaction in describing and explaining the material universe, the living body, the events of history, and psychological behavior.

Ultimately, the book explores the power and danger of metaphorical language and questions the convergence and collapse of scientific and moral explanations of the universe.

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