epitome: a book of uncorrected proofs

What do the Pythagorean theorem and colonialism have in common? (Warning: contains mathematics.)

Mathematics is the last refuge for Platonism as the most protected domain of the true and eternal: epitome assaults mathematics with the riot of bodies. We learn from Nietzsche that all of western philosophy is a grand scheme by the priests of the truth to gain power through deft discourse (philosophy as the will to power of the nerds), with a concomitant repression of the body and its desires as base and ignoble. We learn from Edward Said's Orientalism that this dichotomy has whiteness in Plato's Rational camp, and blackness in the 'denigration' of bodies. The technology used by the West to enslave the colonies was elevated to the realm of the eternal as Science and took the name of God. Luce Irigaray taught us that according to this picture men reason with their minds, and women emote with their bodies. epitome tries to counter some of this mess by showing that the Empress has no clothes: 'The Queen of Science [mathematics] is irrational, imaginary, incomplete, undecidable'.

A new helping of Henry Flynt's original Concept Art.

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Acknowledgements

Marcel Duchamp, Oulipian and Chess Player

Friedrich Nietzsche, Artist and Philosopher

Lewis Carroll, Mathematician and Writer

Christian Bök, Poet and 'Pataphysician

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