[lbo-talk] Philip Mirowski - Social Physicist

[Shane Mage]

> .
> (1) The classic example given by Borges and quoted in Foucault's
> "Order of Things".
>
> In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a
> certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent
> Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
> 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 camel hair brush,
> 12. others,
> 13. those that have just broken a flower vase
> 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.
>
> Note that this is an explication of some of the structural
> classifications in China at the time.

Nonsense.  Borges is writing fiction.  Those "structural  
classifications" have about as much reality as...the Library of Babylon!

Shane Mage


> Porphyry in his Abstinance from Animal Flesh suggests that there are  
> appropriate offerings to all the Gods, and to the highest the only  
> offering acceptable is silence.