The Order of Things 
        (inaccurate English translation of "Les Mots et Les Choses")

by Michel Foucault

PREFACE

This book 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,
the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our gepgraphie -
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 encyclopedia"
in which it is written that "animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) emblamed, (c) tame, 
(d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs,
(h) included in the current 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 fable, 
is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought,
is the limitation of our own, 
the stark impossibility of thinking that.