{"product_id":"genesis-michel-serres-9780472105922","title":"Genesis","description":"This English translation of Michel Serres' 1982 book Genèse 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, \u003ci\u003eGenesis \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.\u003cbr\u003eSerres 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 \u003ci\u003econceived, \u003c\/i\u003e but which perhaps can still be sensed, felt, and \u003ci\u003eheard \u003c\/i\u003eraging in chaos beneath the momentary crests of order imposed by human civilization.\u003cbr\u003ePhilosophy 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Book: \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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 \u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" --\u003ci\u003eWord\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Michel Serres\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0472105922\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780472105922\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Michigan Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/07\/1995\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 152\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.84lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.84h x 5.84w x 0.76d","brand":"Michel Serres","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48086703014143,"sku":"9780472105922","price":74.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_f4c52bf2-ff76-49bd-a7b6-0a9145fcb0ac.jpg?v=1769096087","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/genesis-michel-serres-9780472105922","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}