Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

A 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 called 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. Bizzare-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 give shape to a new trans-science, "homeotics."