Table Of ContentBizarre-Privileged Items
in the Universe
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Bizarre-Privileged Items
in the Universe
The Logic of Likeness
Paul North
Z O N E B O O K S • N E W Y O R K
2021
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© 2021 Paul North
zone books
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Brooklyn, NY 11218
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Printed in the United States of America.
Distributed by Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey, and Woodstock, United Kingdom
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: North, Paul, 1971– author.
Title: Bizarre-privileged items in the universe : the logic of likeness /
Paul North.
Description: New York : Zone Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “This book affirms the
experience of likeness at the heart of many, if not all, disciplines
of knowledge and seeks to formalize that basic experience into
a science of its own, ‘homeotics.’ ” — Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: lccn 2020021855 (print) | lccn 2020021856 (ebook) |
isbn 9781942130468 (hardback) | isbn 9781942130499 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: Representation (Philosophy)
Classification: lcc b105.r4 n67 2020 (print) | lcc b105.r4 (ebook) |
ddc 110 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021855
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021856
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To
Theo & Callie
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. . . to establish the existence of bizarre-privileged items
in the universe, which served as objective guarantors
for lyrical emotion and the poetic image at the same time.
—
Roger Caillois
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Contents
Preamble
11
§1 Everything is like everything in some respect.
15
§2 A thing is a plenum of likenesses.
61
§3 Likenesses circumradiate.
103
§4 World is an asymmetrical array.
149
§5 Homeosis remains from yielding.
189
§6 What has yielded goes on display.
219
§7 Likenesses serve enlikening.
257
Teachers
283
Notes
285
Works Cited
313
Index
321
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Preamble
The sentences that follow move through seven major premises that
lay out something like a logic of likeness. Through their stepwise
progression and in their accumulated intentions, the premises reflect
two separate aspirations. First, they are meant to bring a reader from
a naïve and defensive position toward likeness to a discerning and
receptive position toward it. At least, that is the wish. A receptive
position is approached through a modification of the initial naïve
premise, “Everything is like everything in some respect,” a mainstay
of empiricism since Hume. Further premises travel away from the
initial naïve premise. Each subsequent premise follows from the pre-
vious, as premises are supposed to do, but also modifies it. As they
are modified, the premises converge on a topic, homeosis, homeosis
being a name for the happening of likeness. A “subsequent” is a bet-
ter premise, that is to say a more homeotic premise, than an “ante-
cedent” premise. Second, while departing from a naïve position and
transiting toward a reflective position, the premises also conjure
up a complex cosmos in which homeosis is the basic element. For
example, Premise 4 says “World is an asymmetrical array.”
To move from a naïve view of a trivial phenomenon toward a
reflective encounter with a new whole that acts by and large accord-
—
ing to likeness’s eccentric habits this is the book’s wager. The
stakes are high. If likeness is the basic element of this cosmos, then
there are no beings and no being. Instead, there is an arraying display
of inertial pairs with overlapping traits. In place of individual objects
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BIZARRE-PRIVILEGED ITEMS IN THE UNIVERSE
in motion, this cosmos displays pairs in inertia with respect to one
another. In place of independent entities, this cosmos arrays nodes
or points of qualitative overlap. These pairs with overlaps were best
described by Roger Caillois when he proposed “to establish the exis-
tence of bizarre-privileged items [éléments insolites-privilégiés] in the
universe” (“The Natural Fantastic,” in The Edge of Surrealism, p. 350,
note 1; “Le fantastique naturel,” in Cases d’un échiquier, p. 62, note 1).
Caillois’s most provocative example of a bizarre-privileged item
is the praying mantis. As he sees it, the mantis overlaps with a human
fear and a human desire, the fear of death and the desire for sex, turn-
ing the figure that results into a “bizarre” amalgam of human and
animal, nature and psyche and culture, will and being, an eccentric
conjunction among the most disparate regions. The mantis is one
example of such an item. As it turns out, a community of bizarre-
privileged items exists, cosmic points at which likenesses, which
cut across modes of existence, overlap. Overlapping is homeosis’s
mode of existence. The presentation that follows collects a menag-
erie of bizarre overlaps. Along the way, the presentation also collects
a vocabulary for talking about a likeness cosmos. As the premises
proceed, terms are gathered from historical sources that depended
on likeness, even if those sources only ever partially theorized it.
“Likeness” or figures like it have played decisive roles in a variety
of discourses over the history of Europe and its satellites. Aristotle
makes homeosis, at one point in the Poetics, the operative force
within mimesis. Plotinus makes homeosis the glue holding the lad-
der of emanations together and to the One. Much later in chrono-
logical history, Darwin, following a long lineage of taxonomists,
makes “resemblance” the highest principle in nature, while at the
same time altering the meaning and scope of the term. Before him,
Hume makes it the highest principle of mind. None of these think-
ers, except for Plotinus, and then only in a roundabout way, tells
you where exactly likeness fits among the other basic principles.
Here, the individual sources for a likeness lexicon have been chosen
for their conceptual daring and terminological precision, and they
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PREAMBLE
are arranged by their best placement in a theory of likeness under
construction, rather than according to their chronological place in
a history.
“History,” in the European sense, has never got past likeness.
When it comes to likeness, modernity and antiquity are not really
distinct. Foucault’s version of things simply cannot be right. The
argument in The Order of Things hinges in part on the presupposition
that likeness was once a basic principle, and “modernity” abandoned
it or relegated it to a trivial position. Modernity is on the whole and
in its essence anhomeotic, or so goes the thesis. From the perspective
of likeness, the modern world never happened. This is not all that
tragic, since the classical world never ended, either, or to use a more
—
apt term, the archaic the archaic does not release its grip on mind
and nature, then and now. A scene that repeats across this swampy
nonhistory is one in which a thinker compares likeness unfavorably
with being and then surreptitiously explains being by means of like-
ness. In the garden of ontology, the alien seed likeness sprouts every-
where, and discourses committed to a cosmos full of entities struggle
to contain its weedy growth. The philosophical purpose of this book
is to challenge ontology with an alternative discipline that can be
called homeotics. Homeotics would make the third in a triptych of
fundamental explanatory schemata whose inner relations still need
— —
to be understood: ontology semiotics homeotics.
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