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THINKING WITH BORGES William Egginton and David E. Johnson Editors The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado © 2009 by William Egginton and David E. Johnson. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher: The Davies Group, Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, CO 80044-0140 Library of Congress Cataloging-in publication data: Thinking with Borges : William Egginton and David E. Johnson, editors. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-934542-11-8 (alk. paper) 1. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986—Philosophy. I. Egginton, William, 1969– II. Johnson, David E., 1959– PQ7797.B635Z9356 2009 868’.6209–dc22 2009000492 Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper 0123456789 Contents vii List of Contributors 1 David E. Johnson Borges and the Letter of Philosophy Stephen Gingerich Nothing and Everything: 19 Theoretical and Practical Nihilism in Borges 37 Bruno Bosteels Borges as Antiphilosopher William Egginton Three Versions of Divisibility: 49 Borges, Kant, and the Quantum 69 Krzysztof Ziarek The “Fiction” of Possibility Santiago Colás The Difference that Time Makes: 87 Hopelessness and Potency in Borges’s “El Aleph” Brett Levinson Crossbreeds: Aesthetics Misencounters Politics 103 in “El evangelio según Marcos” Alberto Moreiras Newness, World Language, Alterity: 121 On Borges’s Mark 141 Kate Jenckes Borges Before the Law Eva Horn Borges’s Duels: Friends, Enemies, 161 and the Fictions of History Lisa Block de Behar Antecedents of an Unexpected Poetic 183 Affinity: Jorge Luis Borges as Reader of Martin Buber 203 Notes Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the participants, students, and colleagues who attended and engaged in the colloquium “Borges and Philosophy,” organized at the University at Buffalo in April of 2005. iv The Contributors Lisa Block de Behar is professor of Theory of Communication at the Universidad de la República (Uruguay). She earned a Ph.D. in Language and Literature at the École des Hautes Etudes (France) and is the author of, among other books, Jules Laforgue. Les métaphores du déplacement (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2004); Borges. The Passion of an Endless Quotation (SUNY Press, USA, 2002) and A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Selected Writings (Mouton, Berlin, 1995), as well as of numerous articles. She was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship in 2001. Bruno Bosteels is associate professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico (Santiago, Chile: Palinodia, 2007), Badiou and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), and Marx and Freud in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). He is the translator of Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009), What Is Antiphilosophy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), and Can Politics Be Thought? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). He currently also serves as general editor of diacritics. Santiago Colás is associate professor of Comparative Literature and Arts and Ideas in the Humanities at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm and of articles on the politics of Latin American literature in such journals as CR: The New Centennial Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, PMLA, and Discourse. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled A Book of Joys: Towards an Ethics of Immanent Close Reading, a comparative study exploring the ethical dimensions of reading through studies of such writers, among others, as Borges, Julio Cortázar, Felisberto Hernández, Horacio Quiroga, and Roberto Arlt. William Egginton is professor and chair of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), and The Philosopher’s Desire (2007). Stephen Gingerich holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is assistant professor of v Spanish at Cleveland State University. His work on the intersection of philosophy and literature in Hispanic letters has appeared in Hispania, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Cincinnati Romance Review, and CR: The New Centennial Review. Eva Horn is professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is the author of Der geheime Krieg. Verrat, Spionage und moderne Fiktion (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 2007) and numerous articles that focus on enmity, secrecy and political theory in modern literature. She has recently edited Dark Powers: Conspiracies in History and Fiction, New German Critique 103, February 2008. Kate Jenckes teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Reading Borges After Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History (SUNY Press, 2007). She is currently writing a book about blind witnessing in Chilean and Argentine literature. David E. Johnson is associate professor and chair of comparative literature at the University at Buffalo. He is the co-author of Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture (2008), and the co-editor of Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (1997), as well as of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review. Brett Levinson is a professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Secondary Moderns: History, Mimesis, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expression” (1996), The Ends of Literature (2002), Market and Thought (2004), and numerous articles on philosophy and Latin American literature. Alberto Moreiras is Sixth Century professor of Modern Thought and Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and regular visiting professor of Romance Languages at the University at Buffalo. He is author of Interpretación y Diferencia; Tercer Espacio: Duelo y Literatura en America Latina; The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies; and Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo politico. He is coeditor (with Nelly Richard) of Pensar en/la Posdictadura and coeditor of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. vi Krzysztof Ziarek is professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (SUNY), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern), and The Force of Art (Stanford). He has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co- edited two collections of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford). He is the author of two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sąd dostateczny. vii Introduction Borges and the Letter of Philosophy David E. Johnson for Paula Cucurella Lavín No doubt I hesitated between philosophy and literature, giving up neither, perhaps seeking obscurely a place from which the history of this frontier could be thought or even displaced.… Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”1 My “first” inclination wasn’t really toward philosophy, but rather toward literature, no, toward something that literature accommo- dates more easily than philosophy. Jacques Derrida, “An Interview with Derrida”2 The attempt to marginalize Borges’s philosophical investment is wide- spread and, as Stephen Gingerich points out in his contribution to this volume, often buttressed by Borges’s own statements.3 For instance, in Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Phys- ics, Floyd Merrell quotes Borges from his preface to Ronald Christ’s The Narrow Act (1969) as saying that he is “neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that re- spected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of lit- erature.”4 In response to María Esther Vázquez’s observation that the literary critic Anderson Imbert had argued that Borges was, at bottom, “a nihilist with vast knowledge of all philosophical schools” and that “in each of his stories he had attempted a different philosophical direction without participating vitally in any of them,” Borges remarked the fol- lowing: “Yes, it is true. I am neither a philosopher nor a metaphysician; what I have done is to exploit [explotar: also to explode, to work], or to explore—a more noble word—the literary possibilities of philosophy.”5 Further, of the claim that he was an idealist, Borges simply observed, “if 2 THINKING WITH BORGES I have a share in that philosophy, it has been for the particular proposi- tions of the story and while I was writing it” (105). On more than one occasion, Daniel Balderston, one of the leading literary critical authori- ties on Borges, follows Carla Cordua, who, Balderston affirms, “argues that Borges was not a metaphysician and, hence, that for him ‘the philo- sophical element, first isolated from its context and then treated not as a concept but as a thing or as a singular existing situation, is thus removed from its medium, separated from the function it had in that medium, and converted into an opaque sign, suggestive but in the final analysis unde- cipherable.’”6 More recently, Balderston has relied on Cordua in order to assert that “Borges does neither philosophy nor theory, but his texts take philosophy and theory as an object.”7 Any number of questions stem from the critical attempts to draw a line once and for all between Borges and philosophy. From what does one save Borges—from what does Borges save himself—when he is saved from philosophy? For what is he saved and does he save himself? What does it mean to be a philosopher, if not someone who reads philosophy, thereby taking the philosophical text “as an object,” as Cordua—and by extension Balderston—claims Borges does? How does exploiting and ex- ploding, which is also simply working, the so-called literary possibilities of philosophy not amount to doing philosophy? What sign, finally, is not opaque, suggestive but finally indecipherable? As Cordua’s remarks make clear, not only literary critics patrol the border between philosophy and literature seeking to keep Borges safely on literature’s side. Perhaps somewhat ironically, philosophers maintain the border between philosophy and literature along precisely the same lines as the literary critics. In the case of the philosophers, however, it seems they are saving philosophy from Borges and, by extension, from literature. In her introduction to Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco, Carolyn Korsmeyer points out that one achievement of philosophical discourse is “a certain detachability of philosophical content from its textual vehicle.”8 Recall that Cordua will have saved Borges from philosophy by arguing that he detaches philosophical concepts from their context, thereby con- verting them into opaque signs. Beatriz Sarlo suggests that such detach- ment defines literature as such: “Literature is, precisely (and specifically), a symbolic practice that breaks with the immediacy of memory, perception INTRODUCTION 3 and repetition. Literature works with the heterogeneous, it cuts, pastes, skips over things, mixes.”9 Nevertheless, as Korsmeyer suggests, the pos- sibility of such detachment is one of the defining criteria of philosophical discourse. Indeed, it is on the basis of the necessary separation of philo- sophical discourse from the context of its articulation, a separation that ostensibly marks the formal limits of philosophy and literature, that the philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia denies the Borgesian text entry to philoso- phy.10 Gracia contends: “A literary work is distinguished from a philo- sophical one in that its conditions of identity include the text of which it is the meaning. This is to say that the signs of which the text is composed, the entities of which these signs are constituted, and the arrangements of the signs and the entities that constitute the signs are essential to the literary work” (91).11 But this is not the case, he argues, with philosophical works: “It should not really matter whether I read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in German or English (in fact, many believe it is better to read it in English). What should matter is that I get the ideas. The work is not essentially related to German, whereas Shakespeare’s Hamlet could have been written only in English and Cervantes’ Don Quixote could have been written only in Spanish” (91). Consequently, the border dividing philoso- phy from literature is the limit of translation. Gracia no doubt correctly interprets Gustav Mahler’s statement, in a letter to his wife, that what is “peculiar”—most proper, then—to works of art is their defiance of “ratio- nality and expression,” as meaning “that works of art are not reducible to ideas and, therefore, cannot be effectively translated” (85). Gracia then stipulates that this distinction holds for philosophy as well: “If works of art are idiosyncratic in this way, then it would be expected that this is also what distinguishes them from works of philosophy. Whereas art is irre- ducible to ideas and defies translation, philosophy is reducible to ideas and can be translated” (85). In short, literature does not attain a level of ideality sufficient to transcend and thus to relieve itself of its materiality, from the language in which it will have been written, spoken, thought. Literature, then, is simply too singular, too idiosyncratic. Philosophy, however, is so thoroughly ideal that it will never have had any philosophically relevant attachment to the language of its articulation, thus making it absolutely translatable. Gracia contends that because Kant is a philosopher whose work is finally reducible to ideas, his work should be translatable into any
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