Latin American Philosophy of Literature

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Se comenta el artículo de Marisa Moyano y Hugo Aguilar sobre "El ensayo de interpretación continental: lecturas performativas y pensamiento identitario en ‘Ariel’ ". Ni reflejo pasivo de una realidad previa, ni palabra demiúrgica inventora de una realidad imaginada, los discursos identitarios son momentos reflexivos en una red inter-narrativa e inter-subjetiva de palabras, gestos y actos que afirman y constituyen a un grupo humano como sujeto político y cultural.

Esta disertacion es un producto del hechizo y del desconsuelo de leer a Borges. Las obras de Borges, al nivel estetico, construyen laberintos ludicos, entrampadores y matadores con todos sus posibles objetos; al nivel metafisico, sus obras giran, sin excepcion, alrededor del patron de oposiciones y del infinito. De ahi la imposibilidad de su laberinto y su cosmovision ludico-pesimista. En el mundo borgeano, no existe la Verdad, ni el sentido de existencia, ni la iniciativa humana; la muerte es la unica (...) salida/solucion de ese laberinto, de las oposiciones/bifurcaciones/inversiones y del irresoluble infinito. Dada la creencia de ld autora de que la muerte/el infinito no puede ser la unica solucion para el laberinto borgeano, la disertacion explora nuevas y constructivas posibilidades para ese laberinto. ;El primer capitulo examina como se manifiesta el laberinto estilistico en las obras de Borges y como se asocia con el laberinto metafisico; el segundo capitulo se dedica a la cosmovision de Borges para elaborar la caracteristica laberintica en su pensamiento: su discurso cerrado, su fatalismo jugueton y su pasiva Weltanschauung; el tercer capitulo coloca a Borges en el contexto occidental para presentar la problematica tanto del logocentrismo como del desconstruccionismo--la problematica borgeana; mientras que el cuarto capitulo le ubica al argentino en el contexto oriental explorando salidas positivas de su laberinto a traves de la comparacion del maniqueismo con el dualismo, la cosmovision resignada con la antropocentrica y el intelectualismo borgeano con el trascendentalismo espiritual. ;El fruto de este estudio debe ser una sintesis de los conocimientos directos de la autora sobre las culturas, literaturas y filosofias del mundo occidental y del mundo oriental; debe ser un estudio de las fundaciones metafisicas de la literatura de Borges; debe ser un "rompehechizos" de lo borgeano; y sobre todo, debe ser un desafio para el laberinto de Borges, un desafio existencial y espiritual. (shrink)

By examining the works of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, and the parallels it has with modern physics, literature and science converge in their quest for truth regarding the structure and meaning of the universe. The classical perception of physics as a "hard" science--that of quantitative, rational thought which was established during the Newtonian era--has been replaced by the "new physics," which integrates the so-called "soft" elements into its paradigm. It presents us with a universe based not exclusively on (...) a series of particle-like interactions, or a "billiard-ball" hypothesis where discrete objects have a measurable position and velocity in absolute space and time, but rather on a combination of these mechanistic properties and those that make up the non-physical side of nature such as intuition, consciousness, and emotion. According to physicists like James Jeans science has been "humanized" to the extent that the universe as a "great machine" has been converted into a "great thought." ;In nearly all his collections of essays and short stories, Borges complements the new physics by producing a literature that can be described as "scientized." The abstract, metaphysical implications and concerns of the new world-view, such as space, time, language, consciousness, free will, determinism, etc., appear repeatedly throughout Borges' texts, and are treated in terms that are remarkably similar to those expressed in the scientific texts whose authors include Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. ;As a final comparison, Borges and post-modern physicists address the question of the individual's ability to ever comprehend the universe. They share an attitude of incredulity toward all models and theories of reality simply because they are based on partial information, and therefore seen only as conjectures. (shrink)

A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

The idea that is possible to produce new forms of subjectivity, trough an intelligent use of expression, has been recurring in modern and contemporary literature. Fiction, in this sense, has played a central role in the construction of national identities. Even if programmatically he always stud up on the antipodes of literary commitment, in his youth Borges saw in art a «political compensatory function » of this type. Namely, he claimed that, in order to escape from the tight spots in (...) which we get enclosed, literature can help us in the work of reinvent ourselves as individual and collective subjects. Using concepts from Deleuze and Foucault, Rancière and Burgoyne, this article tries to analyze that secret borgean politics, as a case study of a wider aspiration of literature to operate on the agency of the forms we have to say «I» and «Us». (shrink)

As I'm a writer, I'll begin with a story. It's not, I'm sorry to say, one of my own – I wish it were – but it is very philosophical. It's by the great blind Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, and it's called ‘Funes the Memorious’. Somewhere in a marshy province of Uruguay, Borges comes across a young man called Funes who has gone into an extraordinary mental state after a crippling fall from a horse. He is quite unable to forget (...) anything that has ever happened to him in his physical or mental life. He ‘not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it’ – and with exceptional vividness. In an attempt to manage this colossal burden, Funes thinks about classifying and reducing his memories to some practical order. But ‘two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable, and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.’. (shrink)

Of the factors that contribute to a lack of awareness and appreciation by the English-reading world of the development of philosophy in Latin America, themost serious is the lack of bibliographical materials. To compile such was the purpose of the Conference on Teaching Materials for the Study of Latin American Thought held recently at the American University in Washington, D.C. Since the majority of the participants were connected with Latin American Studies Programs, the bibliographies proposed for the various projects were, (...) for the most part, in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. This language barrier still excludes the overwhelming majority of those in the English-reading world interested in matters philosophic from learning what has happened and is happening in that field in Latin America. Accordingly, what follows is a bibliographical introduction to works in English, discussed in the order of their appearance, on the study of philosophy in Latin America. Only what this author considers major works will be discussed, as limited space prevents an exhaustive bibliography. (shrink)

This dissertation presents a broad diachronic overview of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Unlike most critical approaches, which have tended to focus primarily on 'content', this work is concerned with the stylistic, rhetorical, and philosophical strategies that govern the operation of his texts as a whole. It attempts to describe the emergence, predominance, and eventual exhaustion of these principles within the operation of Borges' texts. ;Borges' oeuvre is characterized as a machine, in the sense in which Systems Theory speaks (...) of non-trivial, unreliable machines. This mechanism is described as unstable, complex, and autopoietic. It is unstable because the rules of its operation, its generative principles, do not remain constant, but are fluid and unpredictable, thus justifying a diachronic approach. The machine dismantles and reassembles itself, generating textual fluidity in a manner akin to deconstruction. Its complexity is described in part in terms of a quantitative accumulation of materials, and in terms of surprise generating devices such as emergence and paradox. As an autopoietic entity, it has operative closure, which accounts for the assimilation to a Borgesian 'logic' of numerous and diverse materials, as well as the operations of self-observation, or re-entry, that define its instability. ;The diachronical description of the main 'generative principles' governing the operation of Borges' work is organized in three main periods: 1923--30, 1931--55, and 1955--86. Some of these principles include: minor literature, fragmentation, baroque style, humor, distinctions, identity, stylistic tension, compression, exponential literature, quoting and assimilation, 'enactive' thought, paradox, abduction, blindness, orality, understatement, and ethics. The analysis operates in an interface between content and style. Borges' style is described, in a manner close to Aristotelian rhetoric, as having philosophical implications. ;In its conclusions, this work discards the possibility of a Borgesian teleology. There is no end to the instability of the machine's operation. Nevertheless, it is possible to allude to a productive and not merely deconstructive component in his texts. In spite of its fluidity, the accumulation generates a somewhat ghostly configuration, which is described in terms of residues, gaps, and imminence. (shrink)

The writings of Jorge Luis Borges are finely in tune with some of the most innovative trends in contemporary criticism and theory, especially in answer to the questioning of subjectivity and representation in the human sciences. Adopting a constructivist approach, this reading gauges the impact of Borges's texts as they respond to this two-fold question through monstrosity and cartography. Whether as the hybrid, the purposeless, or the infamous, monstrosity in Borges is a multiple symbol irreducible to the concepts, forms, and (...) final ends of classical epistemology and ontology. This groundless multiplicity is the site where the subject and object of the human sciences collapse. Borges is not only the curator of a teratological museum but his own writings have also been seen as monstrous and inhuman. This anomaly offers indispensable leverage to deconstruct the anthropocentric tradition of metaphysics. As a science of the positive unconscious, teratology is the absent center of both Michel Foucault's archaeology and Jacques Derrida's grammatology of the human sciences. ;Monstrosity remains above all a critical power--the force of alterity that is the constitutive outside of conceptual unity and identity. Cartography in Borges, to the contrary, not only is the site of a deconstruction, but also holds the promise for a constructive redefinition of representation. Following a scholastic distinction, Borges unmasks the mimetic model of Platonic realism as formally untenable and politically undesirable, while he accepts the premise of Aristotelian nominalism which views language as arbitrary. With subtle hints Borges in fact proposes a third view, most akin to pragmatism. Displacing the attention from imitating to making, his poietic cartography revolves around a principle of conjectural inference rather than a mimetic equivalence. Especially Charles S. Peirce's abduction, or hypothetical code-making, serves as an alternative to the classical models of imitation and expression, as well as to the recent model of simulation. Borges at once undermines the stable foundations of ancient and modern metaphysics, along the lines of poststructuralism, and implies a constructive response to the crisis of language and subjectivity, in the vein of pragmatism. (shrink)