The semantic history of a couple. The action and reaction of the physician and the critic

Abstract

In the dense volume Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, Jean Starobinski, using the two methods of his double formation, medicine, and literary criticism, reconstructs a complex ‘semantic history’ of the terms action and reaction, and of the couple they form, starting from the Newton’s third law of dynamics. The adventures of this couple of concepts expand into all areas of science, art and everyday life and Starobinski follows their transformations and impact. An important part of this historical and semantic analysis is devoted to the life sciences, from biology and medicine to psychology and psychoanalysis. A book is important for its contents but also for the absences, which push, almost force (by ‘reaction’) to new research and reflections. Thus, the enormous spectrum of problems treated and disciplines wonderfully analysed by Starobinski leaves aside two great ‘scientific revolutions’ of recent decades, which have placed in their theoretical core an original re-discussion of the classic action/reaction couple: the molecular revolution in biology and the emotional revolution in psychology. For the first, all the phenomena of life are controlled by a program made up of letters and words, a program detached from cellular metabolism, which acts without undergoing any reaction, thus splitting the couple. For psychology, an emotion is not a simple reaction to a triggering event, but a complex representative and communicative system, the result of evolution by natural selection.