0x0a’s Weisheit und Wiederholung. 104.052 philosophisch-literarische Desiderata (Wisdom and Repetition: 104,052 Philosophical Desiderata) lists 104,052 combinations of two nouns connected via “und” (German for “and”). Such combinations of nouns as titles are very popular, especially in philosophical literary publications with a certain gesture of megalomania. One thinks, for example, of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, and Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization.

A list of publications with titles in this particular format, collected by Hendrikje Schauer and Marcel Lepper for Titelpaare. Ein philosophisches und literarisches Wörterbuch (Title pairs. A philosophical and literary dictionary, 2018), served as a corpus. Using a Python script, 0x0a dissected these titles into their two constituent parts and recombined them in all possible ways, deleting duplicates due to nouns that appear more than once in the list. They then arranged all pairs in ascending order by length. To fit each pair into a line, the font size gets smaller and smaller, so that the longest pairs at the very end of the book become barely legible. Titles that were already listed in Titelpaare are crossed out, turning the list into a “compendium of potential literature” (Hannes Bajohr, “Afterword”) as well as a to-do list for future intellectual great minds and a prompt for readers to implement one of the suggested titles; after all, the blurb proclaims, “not everything has been said yet.”

Weisheit und Wiederholung appropriates the cover and paratext design of the most prestigious German scholarly paperback series Suhrkamp Wissenschaft. Thus, the publication also functions as an analysis of a certain, highly influential style of theory building and marketing in German academia. The imprint parodies the customs of the book and library world by reversing all the usual statements about cataloging in the German National Library and copyright: even the © symbol has an inverted “C.” The printer is listed as Lulu Press, Inc. and the printing location is truthfully stated as “Printed who knows where.”