The Shock of the Same: An Anti-Philosophy of Clichés

Since the birth of modernity, Western thought has been at war with clichés. The association of philosophical and cultural integrity with originality, and the corresponding need for invention and novelty, has been a distinct concern of a whole spectrum of ideas and movements, from Nietzsches polemics against the herd, the shock of the new of the artistic avant-garde, the Frankfurt Schools critique of mass culture, to Orwells defence of political dialogue from dying metaphors.

This book is the first examination of the cliché as a philosophical concept. Challenging the idea that clichés are lazy or spurious opposites to genuine thinking, it instead locates them as a dynamic and contestable boundary between thought and non-thought. The book unpacks the constituent phenomena of clichés repetition, circulation, the readymade, same-ness through readings of anti-philosophical thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Paulhan, de Certeau, Derrida, Sloterdijk, Badiou and Groys. In doing so, the book critically articulates the techniques and technologies through which the boundary between thought and non-thought is formed in modern Western philosophy.

Rejecting the idea that clichés should be dismissed out of hand on normative frameworks of good and bad thinking, or new and old ideas, it instead interrogates the material, cultural and archival ground on which these frameworks are built. See more