Slog

News from the underworld:

Miners in Lesotho have discovered a huge gem stone which may become the largest ever polished diamond.

The stone weighs 478 carats and is the 20th largest rough diamond ever found, said Gem Diamonds.

The company said the uncut rock was recovered recently from the Letseng mine, owned by the company in Lesotho.

The diamond, which is as yet unnamed, has the potential to yield a 150 carat cut stone, and could sell for tens of millions of dollars, the company said.

This brilliant piece of news recalls an equally brilliant passage in Foucault’s The Order of Things—a passage that considers a tendency in pre-modern thought/episteme/paradigm to correspond the “terrestrial and celestial,” the heavenly with the “glittering, hidden veins where metals grow in darkness.” There was the blackness of space and the blackness of the caves; the stars in the eternal darkness of space and the “treasures buried in the earth since the creation of the world.” “The dark dangerous, and accursed glitter of metal…[and] that other glitter that sings at the far end of the night.”