The Shock of the Same: An Antiphilosophy of Cliches

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, and so on – through readings of ‘anti-philosophical’ thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Paulhan, Derrida, Sloterdijk, 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.