An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and artA butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl's face, a scholar flying from book to book. The most disparate things approach one another in a butterfly, the sort of dense nodule of likeness that Roger Caillois once proposed calling a "bizarre-privileged item." In response, critical theorist Paul North proposes a spiritual exercise: imagine a universe made up solely of likenesses. There are no things, only traits acting according to the law of series, here and there a thick overlap that appears "bizarre."Centuries of thought have fixated on the concept of difference. This book offers a theory that begins from likeness, where, at any instant, a vast array of series proliferates and remote regions come into contact. Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe follows likenesses as they traverse physics and the physical universe; evolution and evolutionary theory; psychology and the psyche; sociality, language, and art. Divergent sources from an eccentric history help give shape to a new trans-science, "homeotics."
ISBN: | 9781942130468 |
Publisher: | Zone Books |
Imprint: | Zone Books |
Published date: | 23 Mar 2021 |
DEWEY: | 110 |
DEWEY edition: | 23 |
Language: | English |
Number of pages: | 328 |
Weight: | 648g |
Height: | 236mm |
Width: | 161mm |
Spine width: | 32mm |