After our lively discussions of Nietzsche the other day, and especially after reading the many insightful posts about his argument, I found myself thinking about Michel Foucault’s quotation of the great Argentinian critic and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges. I know that was the most English professor sentence ever, but bear with me…

We’ll meet Foucault later in the term. For now, it’s enough to point out that Foucault borrows from Nietzsche a desire to expose the contingent nature of the “discourses” that structure knowledge, to reveal systems that purport to deliver “truth” as constructed “columbariums” or “prison-houses.” Here, in the preface to his book Order of Things, Foucault describes the eureka moment he experienced when reading Borges’s essay on the nature of language. To illustrate the principle (which Nietzsche explores as well, of course) that the same persons, places, or things might be conceptualized or schematized in many different, equally “true” ways, Borges invents a fictitious “Chinese Encyclopedia” that claims to organize all of animal life into an orderly schema. Whereas Western science uses Kingdom/Phylum/Class/Order… (I’m sure I’m messing this up), this Encyclopedia orders things very differently:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Foucault confesses that the passage inspired

laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our 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. […] 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.”

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.

Some of you observed a certain “pessimism” or “nihilism” or “elitism” in Nietzsche’s essay. And I get that. But here we feel the pleasure, which Nietzsche shares, of escaping our sensorial and conceptual “prisons,” of seeing, hearing, and feeling things in a new way, of recognizing that our world is more complex and unknowable than we thought.