Convenientia is a resemblance connected with space in the form of a graduated scale of proximity. It is of the same order as conjunction and adjustment. This is why it pertains less to the things themselves than to the world in which they exist. The world is simply the universal ‘convenience’ of things; there are the same number of fishes in the water as there are animals, or objects produced by nature or man, on the land (are there not fishes called Episcopus, others called Catena, and others called Priapus?); the same number of beings in the water and on the surface of the earth as there are in the sky, the inhabitants of the former corresponding with those of the latter; and lastly, there are the same number of beings in the whole of creation as may be found eminently contained in God himself ‘the Sower of Existence, of Power, of Knowledge and of Love’. Thus, by this linking of resemblance with space, this ‘convenience’ that brings like things together and makes adjacent things similar, the world is linked together like a chain.
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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