Genesis (Studies in Literature and Science) | 
| Author: Michel Serres
Creators: Genevieve James, James Nielson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 795814
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 152
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.5
ISBN: 0472084356
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN: 9780472084357
ASIN: 0472084356
Publication Date: September 15, 1997
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Product Description
This English translation of Michel Serres' 1982 book Genese captures in lucid prose the startling breadth and depth of his thinking, as he probes the relations between order, disorder, knowledge, anxiety, and violence. Written in a unique blend of scientific discourse and lyrical outburst, classical philosophical idiom and conversational intimacy, by turns angry, playful, refined or discordant, Genesis is an attempt to think outside of metaphysical categories of unity or rational order and to make us hear--through both its content and form--the "noise," the "sound and the fury," that are the background of life and thought.
Serres draws on a vast knowledge of such diverse disciplines as anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics, and a range of cultural material that includes the writings of Plato, Kant, August Comte, Balzac, and Shakespeare, to name a few. He argues that although philosophy has been instrumental in the past in establishing laws of logic and rationality that have been crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our universe, one of the most pressing tasks of thought today is to recognize that such pockets of unity are islands of order in a sea of multiplicity--a sea which cannot really be conceived, but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and heard raging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.
Philosophy of science or prose poetry, a classical meditation on metaphysics or a stream-of-consciousness polemic and veiled invective, Serres mounts a quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all a "noisy" critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, and aesthetics. The result is a work that is at once provocative, poetic, deeply personal, and ultimately religious--an apocalyptic call for the rebirth of philosophy as the art of thinking the unthinkable.
About the Book:
"An intensely beautiful and rigourous meditation on the birth of forms amid chaos and multiplicity from a major philosopher who is also an exquisite craftsman of the written word." --William Paulson, University of Michigan
"Serres exhibits a rare, raw tendentiousness refreshing in its vitriol . . . it's the sort of light-hearted, perverse, and basically liberal tirade one hears too infrequently of late." --Word
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| Customer Reviews:
A stunning philosophical treatise June 26, 1997
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
This book is a tour-de-force from the French philospher of science, Michel Serres. Serres argues that nature is not organised around any -single- principle of organisation, that at all levels, multiplicity abounds: that although logic and rationality have taught us much about ourselves the Universe, that such 'pockets of unity' are merely islands or order in a sea of chaos.Furthermore, we cannot really understand this sea of multiplicity which howls around us: but it can be sensed, -heard-, raging all around it, although it cannot really be -conceived-. By alternately using polemics, scientific method, poetic meditation, aesthetics and literary analysis, he shows how forms are birthed from raging Chaos. All this results in a 'noisy' critique of Order - social theory, history, science, aesthetics, and metaphysics. In French, the word 'noise' no longer means 'noise' (which in French is 'bruit') but rather 'noise' is an archiac word which means 'clamour' or 'ruckus', (chercher noise: "kick up a fuss" or "look for a fight") and this inter-play is used throughout the book. He utilises what is obviously a huge knowledge of literature, art, philosphy and science to rigourously illustrate his thesis. Serres proposes that philosophy's purpose is to "think the unthinkable" in the age of scientific rationality. This momentus volume, written in the 80s but only translated recently (1995), is a must-read for any serious student of philosophy, science, literature, or art. It is also of special interest to those engaged in the field of sound studies for its conception of 'noise' and the relation it contains to music (or order). Lastly, I will quote just paragraph from the section titled 'The Chain' (p71); "Here then is the chain: white sea or white plain, background noise, surge, fluctuation of the surge, bifurcation, repetition, rhythm or cadence, vortex. The great turbulence is constituted, it fades away, it breaks. And disappears as it came. This chain is breaking, it is breaking at every point, it may always break, its characteristic is to snap. It is fragile, unstable. ... It is the chain of genesis. It is not solid. It is never a chain of necessity. Suddenly, it will bifurcate. It goes off on a tangent. It surrenders to the passing signals, the fluctuations of the sea, or some sowing of sameness. This chain is not a chain of chance either, it would remain meticulously broken. It is a chain of contingency, the recruiting takes place through tangency, by local pulls and by degrees, by word of mouth, from one mouth to another. It emerges from the sea noise [bruit], the nautical noise [noise], the prebiotic soup."
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