PATAPHYSICS-THE-POETICS-OF-AN-IMAGINARY- SCIENCE_C_Bok

eality involves an exegetic function, reading signs,
interpreting them, rearranging them within an anagram that
permutes al1 their modes of sympathy and antipathy.
Such an
anatomy of forms distributes signs aesthetically throughout
a nomad regime in which al1 things must conform to an order
of both resemblance and concordance.
Even the difference
between the reasoning of science and the imagining of poetry
does not yet exist because no paradigm provides a consensus
for such verities.
Each text has equal truthfulness. Each
myth can convey what Vico might cal1 a "poetic wisdom"
(110), whose truth owes its power to an error that demands
belief in a "credible impossibilityt' (120)--an as if that
can provide the premise in the future for a nuovo scienza. 4
Poetic wisdom simply monopolizes the totality of both
the subject and the object, leaving no space for modern
science to speak the truth for itself except as an act of
deviance within such a norm.
Poetic wisdom cannot recognize
any disparity between the subjective affect of imagining and
the objective effect of reasoning. Alchemy, for example
resorts to such poetic wisdom in order to imagine a lapis
philoso~horum that can produce a coniuntia o~~ositorum,
harmonizing the disputes among al1 such elements.
Truth
becomes a ritual of scenes in which al1 things can change
their images into each other.
The transitive category for