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, ...