Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe
The Logic of Likeness
An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and art.
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 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.'
Paul North is Professor of German at Yale University. He is the author of The Problem of Distraction and The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation.
