Action and Reaction - The Life and Adventures of a Couple

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