The Paraphilologist as 'Pataphysician

This volume is predicated on the notion that ’pataphysics constitutes the avant-garde destiny of a doomed conserv-ative metaphysics. A conservative metaphysics fetishizes “the rule of the rule.” ’Pataphysics relishes in such a phrase only the logic-cleaving of a sideways-splitting pun: “how many inches in a ruler, my liege?” And, as a lover of puns, ’pataphys-ics is just getting started precisely where one had been asked to end. When wearing his or her outlandish grammatical hat, the ’pataphysicist become ’pataphilologist—or is it the other way around, I forget—oversees the emancipation of logos in a paral-lel revolutionary moment. This revolt upends the dour hegem-ony of generalities in the name of a mass uprising of laughing particularities. The consonance of physis and logos was always a key meta-physical gambit in the west. Shifts in the one domain affect the other because the two are different aspects of the same under-lying unity. The “natural reasonableness” of the world, its con-tents, and human conventions alike has long been “axiomatic.” And many have set themselves up as guardians of this obvious-ness, guardians who will never acknowledge that there might be anything ill-fitted about the world.