pbAn imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and artb pA 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. pCenturies 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. iBizarre-Privileged Items in the Universei follows lik