List No. 107

CELESTIAL EMPORIUM OF BENEVOLENT KNOWLEDGE

Jorge Luis Borges

1942

In 1942, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges penned El idioma analítico de John Wilkins (“The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”), an essay in which he discussed the difficulties associated with man’s repeated attempts to classify all that existed. He did this, primarily, by focusing on a universal language proposed by 17th-century philosopher John Wilkins which divided the contents of the universe into 40 genera, each of which gave an object its first two letters; those categories were then split into 241 differences which offered another letter, and those differences were then divided into 2,030 species to add the final fourth letter – for example, Salmon becomes Zana: Za would identify “fish” (the genus), Zan would identify “squamous river fish” (the difference), and Zana would identify “largest red-fleshed kind” (the species). Borges was unimpressed and ridiculed the idea, comparing the system’s “ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies” to this delightful and now infamous taxonomy of the animal kingdom found in Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia which, unbeknownst to the countless people who went on to be influenced by it, didn’t actually exist outside of Borge’s imagination.  

Those that belong to the emperor

Embalmed ones

Those that are trained

Suckling pigs

Mermaids (or Sirens)

Fabulous ones

Stray dogs

Those that are included in this classification

Those that tremble as if they were mad

Innumerable ones

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

Et cetera

Those that have just broken the flower vase

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies