Concepts
- Clinamen
- A clinamen is the unpredictable swerve of atoms that Bök calls “the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest possible difference”. An example is Jarry’s merdre, a swerve of French: merde ("shit").
- Antinomy
- An antinomy is the mutually incompatible. It represents the duality of things, the echo or symmetry, the good and the evil at the same time. Hugill mentions various examples including the plus minus, the faust-troll, the haldern-ablou, the yes-but, the ha-ha and the paradox.
- Syzygy
- The syzygy originally comes from astronomy and denotes the alignment of three celestial bodies in a straight line. In a pataphysical context it is the pun. It usually describes a conjunction of things, something unexpected and surprising. Serendipity is a simple chance encounter but the syzygy has a more scientific purpose. Bök mentions Jarry saying that the fall of a body towards a centre is the same as the ascension of a vacuum towards a periphery.
- Absolute
- The absolute is the idea of a transcended reality.
- Anomaly
- An anomaly represents the exception. Jarry said that "pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". Bök calls it “the repressed part of a rule which ensure that the rule does not work”.
- Pataphor
- A pataphor is an unusually extended metaphor based on pataphysics. As Jarry claimed that pataphysics exists "as far from metaphysics as metaphysics extends from regular reality," a pataphor attempts to create a figure of speech that exists as far from metaphor as metaphor exists from non-figurative language.
Read more about this topic: 'Pataphysics
Famous quotes containing the word concepts:
“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)