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In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud asserts that “civilization is a process in the service of Eros.”1 Elias, moreover, insists that every civilization must incorporate painful discipline; and for Foucault this painful discipline, by imposing restrictions on our pleasures, is still fundamentally responsible for the invention, intensification and proliferation of these pleasures. If we agree that regulated bodily conduct, not sublimation, is in “the service of Eros” then this book concerns the contribution of Galileo’s pendulum, an important artifact of civilizational discipline, to erotic service. We asked, “How is knowledge related to Galileo’s pendulum produced in such a way that the advancement of rationality in Western civilization served the proliferation of new forms of pleasures through rational domination?” We claimed that mathesis universalis, adopted by Neoplatonists and applied to the world of sensual experience, became the rational scheme for abstract pleasures of analysis and as such, the impetus of the history of rationality, more or less since Galileo. Unified, explained, classified within grids of mathematical axioms, natural phenomena such as motion, gravity or, light, no longer observed and known by the body, became items in that mathematical catalogue of nature in which all things and relations became subject to the “pleasure of analysis” and domination. In spite of the moral rhetoric of seventeenth-century science, perversion as a ruptured normality colors, to a certain extent, the new ontology of things. The discursive organization of this catalogue changed the sensual nature of natural phenomena. The place in the catalogue, rather than a natural site shared with the body and senses, determined the essence of a thing. This new ontology, which made things what they are by virtue of their discursive location, had detrimental consequences, namely the degradation of the body, which prior to Galileo was the standard of normality and truth. By eliminating a phenomenal site and assigning every phenomenon a discursive place in this catalogue, mathematics also eliminated the body as a source of order and knowledge, permitting the mathematical catalogue of nature to transcend 153 C o n c l u s i o n its prior boundaries and creating a fertile propinquity among all things, even among those previously regarded as naturally irreconcilable. Ultimately, with the discursive unification of all things in the catalogue, mathematics (like money in a bourgeois society which perverts the natural incongruities and exchanges “hate” for “love,” and “stupidity” for “wisdom,”) became an abstract unifier, constructing and unifying under the sign of “objectivity” Galileo’s law of free fall and Sade’s sexual pleasures. Framing nature in a mathematical catalogue and subjecting its items to the endless “pleasures of analysis,” we claimed, seventeenth-century science turned scientific rationality into a “gym” of homosocial exercise, and raised questions about the nature of representational unity under the new mathematical canopy. To the extent that Cartesian exclusion of the body and the feminine from the production of scientific rationality created, particularly in the writings of Descartes, a homosocial epistemology and permitted mathematics to unify a system of representation, we retain merely a partial unity of representation . Once the center of knowledge and pleasure, aesthetics and ethics, the body in the seventeenth century represented a myriad of morally and epistemologically corrupted items, such as “bodily pleasures,” “women,” “fallen nature,” “artisanship,” etc., excluded from this unity. The body, however, was not unintelligible. It became a depository of disqualified knowledges, pleasures and identities, defeated by the formal discourses of rationality and consigned to a condition of muteness. And yet, as the site of an experiment or a demonstration, the seventeenth-century experimentalists recognized, as we have seen in the case of Father Riccioli and his faithful Jesuit brothers, the full scope of the body and its role in the production of scientific knowledge. However, this occurred only before their work assumed textual form. When experiential physics becomes mathematical text, the body vanishes from the horizons of knowledge. In this regard, since Galileo, mathematical physics has been rendered as a pairing object. One part of the pair consists of the formal and textual structure of physics, while the other part consists of the body-work through which physics and its phenomena come to life. Whenever today we open a textbook of physics, we encounter only half of this science; the other one is mute in the body of the physicist and in its relation to significant instruments , settings, and other bodies. And yet, the mute part of the pair always plays a significant role not only in making...

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