# Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness - Hardcover

by **Paul North** (Author)

**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."

### Author Biography

**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_.

**Number of Pages:** 336

**Dimensions:** 1.3 x 9.1 x 6.2 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** March 23, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 39.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 39.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness - Hardcover

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