The order of things, c/o Borges

Damn liberal arts degree. I came of thesis age during a time of theoretical posturing (admission: my thesis title included a parenthetical (de), the word "void" and a semi-colon), and so am inevitably steeped in Foucault and Borges the way others might know the great books.

Re-reading Invisible Cities, and the comfort of having your brain drawn back into that posture - like re-gaining a yoga pose and recognizing the muscles stretched - have been impelled to grab for other titles.

So, here's Foucault (in The Order of Things) with the remarkable citing of a Borges passage I'd never found. Like everything else that twisted my brain into new knots in those years, it still stretches me.

Foucault, introduction to: The Order of Things

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.

This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia’ in which it is written that `animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed,
(c) tame,
(d) sucking pigs,
(e) sirens,
(f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the present classification,
(i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable,
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
(1) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off look like flies’.

In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. "

If you don't fill the blog with that which fascinates (you)...

Sorry, back to travel - BULGARIA! - v. soon.

C (head in fun knots)