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 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 encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling 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, (l) 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. Michel Foucault
About This Quote

The title of this quote is taken from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.” It tells of a library containing every possible book. The library is infinite in its scope, but it is not large enough to contain all the books that have ever been written. So the librarian decides to make his collection even larger by adding another shelf to the library. This second shelf contains all the books that have not yet been written; it is, therefore, an infinite collection.

The librarian then goes on to say that he has added shelves and shelves and shelves of them, but the collection is still not large enough to contain all the books that can be imagined. So he decides to make another collection. This one encompasses all of the books yet to be written; it, too, is infinite in its scope, and so on ad infinitum.

Source: The Order Of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences

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