Livant's cure for baldness

Bill Livant

pp. 243-245

in: Bertell Ollman, Tony Smith (eds), Dialectics for the new century, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Abstract

Shrink your head to fit the hair you"ve got left. It's Livant's cure for baldness. And it's free. If you"re not bald, this may be funny. If you are, it's probably not. Why? Why not? This example simply highlights what is true of "fitting" in general. It is never symmetric. It is never equal. The problem of fitting appears to be a problem of fitting two things into one. But two things are never "fit together". One thing is always fit to the other. The amount of hair can be adjusted to fit one's head, but the size of one's head can't be altered to accommodate the amount of hair one has left. Fitting is always asymmetric, always unequal. And when it appears that fitting is equal, you will find that this is a temporary, local moment in that particular fitting process as a whole.