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Serres draws on a vast knowledge of anthropology, classical history, music, theology, art history, information theory, physics, biology, dance and athletics, and Western metaphysics and on a range of writers that includes Plato, Leibniz, Kant, August Comte, Georges Dumezil, Rene Girard, Racine, La Fontaine, Beaumarchais, Balzac, and Shakespeare. 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 that cannot really be conceived but that 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 - Genesis may be all of these and more. Serres mounts a polemical, quirky, at times rhapsodical, but above all "noisy", critique of traditional and current models in social theory, historiography, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and metaphysics. 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.

"Serres fascinates himself with the capricious, laughing, Niezschean dance of change and tranformation that arises once the sly mechanisms introducing flux and fluctuation into the chaotic oceanic miasma are recognized for the primal forces they are. Indeed, while nothing truly new informs Serres's prickly impromtu, it's the sort of light-hearted, perverse, and basically liberal tirade one hears too infrequently of late. An appreciation of music origins in dissonance, and everything else for that matter, 'Genesis' may inspire you to pull your Berg and Webern off the shelf, kick off your clothes, dance up a storm, even make like an ape, man."

Richard Gehr, Word

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