Sympathy plays through the depths of the universe in a free state. It can traverse the vastest spaces in an instant: it falls like a thunderbolt from the distant planet upon the man ruled by that planet; on the other hand, it can be brought into being by a simple contact—as with those ‘mourning roses that have been used at obsequies’ which, simply from their former adjacency with death, will render all persons who smell them ‘sad and moribund’. […] Sympathy is an instance of the Same so strong and so insistent that it will not rest content to be merely one of the forms of likeness; it has the dangerous power of assimilating, of rendering things identical to one another, of mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear—and thus of rendering them foreign to what they were before. Sympathy transforms.
Foucault, Michel. “The Four Similitudes.” In Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 19–28. London: Routledge, 2005.
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