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Descartes claimed that the Cogito is 'so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it'. This paper aims to demonstrate that this claim is false by presenting a sceptical scenario for the Cogito. It is argued that the story 'The Circular Ruins' by J. L. Borges illustrates that one can doubt one's own existence and that pace Descartes (and many others) the claim 'I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind' is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together Frankfurt School poetics and the history of Argentina and Borges's ongoing alterations to his poetic archive, this essay studies his minor poem "El truco" to understand how Borges's poetics strive to reimagine Argentine politics and the project of writing history.

This paper analyzes the concepts of time and consciousness in three works by Jorge Luis Borges. In «The Garden of Forking Paths», the phenomenon of a rhizomorphic labyrinth produces a limitless net of times, forking, converging and parallel to each other. It supposes a huge series of events, developing and coming out simultaneously as a multiplicity of scenarios. Since such kind of a labyrinth has no primary vector, its every point can generally connect to any other point. That is why the inner novel, a world of pure fiction inserted by the author into the main story can interfere with the life of its main characters. «A New Refutation of Time» is at first glance supposed to prove in all possible ways the inexistence of time at the level of metaphysics. However, as a human being, Borges declares himself unable to oppose and resist its implacable course. The third work considered here, «The Rose of Paracelsus», is distant from «The garden of forking paths» as regards the time of publication; nonetheless, it helps to establish unexpected intertextual relations, while the representation of facts as a myth is among its highlights. The reality of creation and destruction constantly present in the work of Borges is described and interpreted as a series of events that occur in the course of time; hence the tale «The South» is also discussed from this point of view. Generally, the works examined emphasize the complexity of time as a multifaceted phenomenon and make the reader think about how unique every moment is.

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Copyright of Universum is the property of Instituto de Estudios Humanisticos Juan Ignacio Molina, Universidad de Talca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El artículo propone una lectura del Borges de Adolfo Bioy Casares, a partir de las observaciones sobre el diario personal y la biografía, que el autor realiza en el ensayo “El diario de Léautaud”, que publica en La Nación en 1956 e incluye luego con variantes en La otra aventura de 1968. Estas observaciones separan a ambos géneros de sus fines convencionales. Bioy retoma una afirmación de Oscar Wilde, que libera lo biográfico de sus pautas formales al inscribirlo en el diario, y hace luego lo propio con lo diarístico al leerlo en la textura de la Vida del Dr. Johnson de James Boswell. La idea medular del artículo sostiene que es solo a condición de estos desplazamientos que la biografía de Johnson puede contarse como antecedente del diario sobre Borges. Mientras el libro de Boswell es una biografía conversada, el antecedente maestro del llamado “giro relacional de la biografía contemporánea”, el Borges, de Bioy, es un diario biográfico, centrado en el registro de las conversaciones que mantuvo con el amigo, durante el extenso período de vida compartido por ambos. La conversación se transforma en materia y escenario de la amistad entre ellos. Como Boswell con Johnson, a menudo Bioy recrea estos intercambios en estilo directo: la voz de Borges es también obra suya. A partir de esta convicción, el artículo examina entonces cómo dramatiza el diario estas conversaciones y la deriva que asumen con la decadencia de Borges. Abstract The article proposes a reading of Adolfo Bioy Casares' Borges, based on the observations on the personal diary and biography, which the author develops in the essay “El diario de Léautaud”, published in La Nación in 1956 and later included with variations in La otra aventura in 1968. These observations separate both genres from their conventional purposes. Bioy takes up a statement by Oscar Wilde, who frees the biographical from its formal guidelines by inscribing it in the diary, and then does the same with the diaristic by reading it in the texture of James Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. The core idea of the article argues that it is only on condition of these displacements that Johnson's biography can be counted as an antecedent of the diary on Borges. While Boswell's book is a conversational biography, the master antecedent of the so-called “relational turn in contemporary biography” (Renders, De Haan, Harmsma, 2016: 6), Bioy's Borges is a biographical diary, centered on the record of the conversations he had with his friend during the long period of their shared life. The conversation becomes the material and scene of friendship between them. Like Boswell with Johnson, Bioy often recreates these exchanges in direct style: Borges's voice is also his work. Based on this conviction, the article then examines how the newspaper dramatizes these conversations and the drift they assume with Borges's decline. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12795860

Este ensayo propone una reflexión sobre la relación entre ciencia, tecnología y literatura a partir de “La biblioteca de Babel” de Jorge Luis Borges y la patafísica, en el contexto de la posnormalidad (Sardar), posverdad (Harsin) y el desarrollo tecnológico. Las principales nociones que proponemos abordar son los papeles adscritos en el arte y la tecnología a la imaginación, la búsqueda de información y el análisis de (macro)datos. Investigaremos el potencial de la ambivalencia, la contradicción y la incertidumbre para crear una hermenéutica para los tiempos actuales y presentar nuevos marcos de interpretación de Borges.

Este ensaio aproxima o nome de Eneida Maria de Souza ao de Jorge Luis Borges com o propósito de evidenciar a presença do escritor argentino na trajetória da autora mineira, em um jogo de duplos que afirma o projeto teórico-crítico de Eneida de Souza. Para tanto, este texto faz uma leitura de um livro e dois artigos dessa autora: “O século de Borges”, “Biografar é metaforizar o real” e “Madame Bovary somos nós”, respectivamente. Como forma de construção argumentativa, será usada a imagem do Aleph como prisma imagético através do qual se pode atravessar o vasto campo crítico e ensaístico de Eneida de Souza, não só pelo modo como se apropriava de detalhes vividos, de pequenos acontecimentos e conseguia fazer grandes conexões interpretativas e ficções teóricas: “A esfera luminosa que dá nome ao conto “O Aleph”, cujo centro está em todas as partes e a circunferência em nenhuma, é o ponto de encontro imaginário, eterno e fugaz do infinito”. (SOUZA, 1999, p. 74-75) Também se propõe a estabelecer relações entre dois personagens Funes, el memorioso e Santiago, o primeiro extraído de um conto de Jorge Luis Borges e o segundo do filme-documentário de João Moreira Salles, numa problematização sobre o campo da memória, desenvolvido por Eneida Maria de Souza.

Borges pretende operar una identificación total entre el paradigma poético y las realizaciones artísticas de Dante. A esto obedece la deconstrucción sistemática de la creación dantesca, asimilada a la poética ideal en virtud de la misma conexión con la vida. Trabajando sobre el complejo de obras borgeanas dedicadas al examen de los lineamientos poéticos generales y específicamente dantescos, se mostrará cómo los dos conjuntos representados configuran dominios idénticos, reveladores de bases epistemológicas coincidentes. En el vértice de las especificaciones borgeanas relativas a Dante encontraremos por tanto la tentativa de fundar, basándose en productos decodificables, una verdadera epistemología creativa.

Starting with references to sacred texts (Torah, Talmud) and the notion that Judaism is constituted by a line of texts and not of blood, I move on to the heterodoxy that, among other aspects, links Borges with Kafka and ways of reading them through their links with philosophy, mathematics, architecture, Judaism, tradition and, especially, through their subversive questioning of all that is.

This article tries to unveil one of the great enigmas of Kafka studies, namely, the identity of the author of the first translation of The Metamorphosis into a foreign language. Indeed, in 1925 the Revista de Occidente published a Spanish version of Kafka’s famous novella, a translation that was 3 years ahead of the first French version and 12 years ahead of the first English version. The author of this translation, which helped to make Kafka’s work known throughout Europe and also in America, has remained unknown until now, despite the most diverse attributions, from Margarita Nelken to Jorge Luis Borges. We try to demonstrate, through solid contextual and textual arguments, that the only possible author of this pioneering translation, still valid today, is the Galician Ramón María Tenreiro.

In this paper, I will first introduce the theoretical authors who have been influential for me in my acquaintance with the humanities or social sciences concerning the machine. I will outline some of the nodes of the vast conceptual web that the machine has brought into being in the 20th century. Later, I will cite some examples from Western and Central European literature of the first half of the 20 th century: Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Ágnes Nemes Nagy break with the tradition of humanist aversion to the machine, since none of them presents the monstrous, inhuman face of the machine. The literary thematizations of the machine by Kafka, Borges, Mann, and Nemes Nagy seem similar in that they all demystify or dialecticize the machine, exploring the broader contexts that lead to its materialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay delves into the mechanisms and functions of a specific category of titles, those assigned to non-existent works (pseudobiblia) or to texts that were only planned but never actualized. These titles exhibit a markedly different and more intricate functionality beyond mere reference. The examples under scrutiny span various eras and contexts, ranging from Doni to Leonardo Sciascia, from an Italian translation of a novel by Philip Dick to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, all against the backdrop of Borges's model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote as he read. He made note of important passages in his books to which he might refer later, listing page numbers and ideas in the endpaper pages. As director of the National Library of Argentina, he maintained this same practice with the library books that he read and returned to be reshelved. In 2017, librarians Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez at the National Library of Argentina published Borges, libros y lecturas, a catalogue of Borges's marginalia and endpaper notes that they discovered in books in the national collection. These published notes confirm the extent to which Borges read Jung and found in books such as Psychology and Alchemy and Psychology and Religion a lexicon with which to map and describe his private cosmology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay we propose an investigation of the work of Jorge Luis Borges as a response to the current crisis of imagination, which has been proclaimed as the central problem of "postnormal times" and also singled-out from other perspectives (ecocriticism, education, posthumanism). The main aim is to examine diverse ways of thinking and imagining that are discernible in the work of Borges, "other inquisitor" in search of marvelous heresies. The theoretical framework of the analysis is based on Deleuze's noological texts on the concept of the "ideal game" (a heterodox anti-metaphysical thought that conceptualizes difference and nonsense) and on pataphysics, which was proclaimed by Deleuze as the only general term that corresponds to all attempts to overcome metaphysics. We propose the thesis that the divergent, paradoxical way of thinking and imagining in Borges, between literature, science and philosophy, is a type of pataphysics, necessary to confront "postnormality". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O esquecimento é uma experiência incómoda da quotidianeidade. Marca de temporalidade e de finitude, tem carácter ontológico e alcance ôntico. Manifesta o caminho da verdade do ser à maneira humana e do ser no mundo de tudo quanto há. Heidegger define esse caminho ontológico incontornável como sendo o da metafísica ocidental, hoje culminante na época da técnica. Mas, numa abordagem meta-ontológica, o fenómeno ontológico de poder esquecer constitui uma possibilidade para o existir de cada um, enquanto projecto. O não-esquecimento compulsivo-obsessivo inibe o a-vir, reduzindo-o a interpretações sedimentadas, pre-determinadas por situações hermenêuticas do sido, congeladas num não-passado. A presente abordagem pretende considerar esta duplicidade do possível e do não-possível, radicada no olvido e na abertura afectiva, ao encontro e ao seu novum, assim habilitado. Para tal, parte de um quadro de Klee e de uma narrativa de Borges, para orientar a leitura de textos de Heidegger, desde 1927 a 1945.

The present paper addresses some intriguing conceptual and historical implications of the notion of border arising from ontology, mereology, topology, and logic. On such seemingly abstract bases, it proceeds to presenting some philosophical reflections on the ethical and political dimensions of the same notion, fostering the idea that extant national and international institutions, and human rights law in particular, ought to be utilised to their full extent in order to deal with global migration-related challenges.

Due to its relevance, memory has been a frequent theme of study in the field of humanities throughout history. In this sense, this piece of work sets out to investigate issues concerning memory and forgetting, taking as its object Borges’s short story “Funes, the memorious”. Methodological procedures comprehend an interpretive analysis of the short story, supported by Nietzsche’s postulates considered relevant for the study, and supplemented by contributions offered by neurosciences, particularly those given by Izquierdo and Luria, in addition to literary criticism commentaries. Conclusions confirm the nietzschean thesis which states that memory excesses and a- historic bonds with the past cause ominous consequences to the life of individuals and societies, as applied to fiction and reality.

Existen elementos formales en el campo de la micro-ficción sobre los cuales la crítica especializada ha llegado a un acuerdo: la brevedad temporal y espacial; el doble movimiento de un discurso identitario junto con una mirada transcultural; la complicidad entre escritor y lector; la atemporalidad de lo narrado y su fugacidad; la preponderancia de lo metaficcional e intertextual; la presencia de diálogos, homenajes, parodias, pastiches, referencias directas o indirectas a otros autores. Teniendo en cuenta la coexistencia y alternancia de estos elementos, analizaremos “La cucaracha soñadora” de Augusto Monterroso, “El caballo” de Jorge Luis Borges y “Cosas soñadas” de Juan José Saer; intentando indagar en: las singularidades de los escenarios oníricos; el diálogo intertextual y metaficcional con escritores de la literatura universal como Kafka, Chaucer y Proust; y por último, el espacio textual en el que aparecen estas micro-ficciones y el desafío interpretativo y creativo que conllevan para el lector.

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce's logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence" and Jorge Luis Borges' "Averroës's Search." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Imagofagia is the property of Imagofagia - AsAECA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Bringing together Frankfurt School poetics and the history of Argentina and Borges's ongoing alterations to his poetic archive, this essay studies his minor poem "El truco" to understand how Borges's poetics strive to reimagine Argentine politics and the project of writing history.

Starting with references to sacred texts (Torah, Talmud) and the notion that Judaism is constituted by a line of texts and not of blood, I move on to the heterodoxy that, among other aspects, links Borges with Kafka and ways of reading them through their links with philosophy, mathematics, architecture, Judaism, tradition and, especially, through their subversive questioning of all that is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tries to unveil one of the great enigmas of Kafka studies, namely, the identity of the author of the first translation of The Metamorphosis into a foreign language. Indeed, in 1925 the Revista de Occidente published a Spanish version of Kafka's famous novella, a translation that was 3 years ahead of the first French version and 12 years ahead of the first English version. The author of this translation, which helped to make Kafka's work known throughout Europe and also in America, has remained unknown until now, despite the most diverse attributions, from Margarita Nelken to Jorge Luis Borges. We try to demonstrate, through solid contextual and textual arguments, that the only possible author of this pioneering translation, still valid today, is the Galician Ramón María Tenreiro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout his extensive literary career, Jorge Luis Borges contributed to the study of Argentine gauchesca, the nineteenth-century genre about frontier life centered on the life of the gaucho. His essays "La poesía gauchesca" (1928) and "El escritor argentino y la tradición" (1932) criticized the hyperbolic praise nationalist scholars such as Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Rojas had bestowed upon José Hernández's Martín Fierro (1872) on the eve of Argentina's centennial celebrations at the turn of the twentieth century. In gauchesca, Borges saw problematic characters which prompted questions regarding what type of nation could result from the glorification of violence such as that found in gauchesca. As a result of his criticisms of the genre, Borges's gaucho short stories "Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)" and "El Sur," are understood as some of the last vestiges of gauchesca, and "El fin" as the coup de grâce that prompted the genre's death. However, this article proposes a closer examination of these stories and essays to reveal that Borges ends a mode of reading gauchesca, not gauchesca itself, arguing that Borges ultimately offers a generic path forward for future writers of the genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1928, Borges published his third book of essays, El idioma de los argentinos [The Language of the Argentines]. There he dedicates an essay to discussing what he supposes to be Góngora’s poetics: because of their historiographical context, Borges associates them with the misnamed culteranismo, which is the title of the essay. The analysis of this early text shows that, despite its paradoxical criticism, Borges «saves» the tools of Baroque poetry: metaphor, mythology, the return to Latin. These tools will constitute the axis of Borges’ own poetic construction when he returns to poetry with El hacedor [The Maker, sometimes also translated as Dreamtigers] in 1960.

Este artículo presenta un análisis del microrrelato “La vuelta del maestro”, atribuido a la escritora y orientalista francesa Alexandra David-Néel, y que aparece en Cuentos breves y extraordinarios, antología preparada por Jorge Luis Borges y Adolfo Bioy Casares, publicada originalmente en 1955. El objetivo principal consiste en exponer los componentes o elementos de una narración brevísima de sello borgiano a partir de la reescritura o falsa traducción de un texto secundario. Para ello, se parte de los postulados de David Lagmanovich a propósito de la invención de un microrrelato, invención constituida por lo que el crítico argentino considera como “un núcleo nebuloso de significación” que da pie a una “intuición” y que desemboca en cuatro elementos discursivos, a saber, y según sus proposiciones: un título, una entrada, un desarrollo y un final. El lugar que ocupa la minipieza objeto de estudio dentro de la antología ejemplifica la construcción de una macroestructura discursiva y el diálogo entre épocas y naciones que los antólogos intentan desplegar en una compilación que hoy se considera canónica en la historia del microrrelato hispánico.

Copyright of Orbis Tertius is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hušang Golširí se ha considerado uno de los autores iraníes más importantes del siglo XX. Su empleo simultáneo de técnicas vanguardistas y argumentos socialmente polémicos caracterizan una obra que rechaza tajantemente el realismo sin nunca alejarse de la realidad. Aquí se presenta la primera traducción al español de su ensayo “Yo no he vivido, quiero ser otros”, donde discute su apreciación del escritor argentino Jorge Luis Borges.

I track some clues of national myths by analysing narrative works (by Borges and some other authors), and sayings about Borges. focusing on how the irruption of Peronism is verified in Borges's narrative (and also in his public interventions and in what is said about his figure). I propose a change of scale: without trying to interpret the great constitutive moments, understanding them as origin myths, I try to build series, with quasi-mythical features, by relating brief syntagms that are repeated in different narrative units. Transversal elements, which go from one story to another. Phrases that are analysed taking the whole of Borges' work as a paradigm, and not just isolated stories. In the first place, I explore certain constants in some stories from the period 1945-54. Then I stop at a series of contemporary versions about a blind Borges who is helped by a young Peronist to cross the street. Thirdly, I question the issue of the appearance of literary oneiric tales about people with bird's claws, linking them to the moral dilemmas of the intellectual elite in the times of the first Peronism. While these sets have a lot in common with myths as they are successive reworkings of a narrative element, they could be approached with mythical analysis methods typical of structural anthropology. However, the material used differs from classical mythologies: a) by containing both oral and written variants; b) both literary and historical facts; c) they admit a verifiable chronological order. I therefore risk here a rather experimental methodological and theoretical exploration, albeit indebted to Lévi-Strauss. I conclude that in these two sets, the functioning of an ideological system can be verified, which is that of the Argentine national formation, with its tensions and crises.

In this article, I analyze the representation of mourning and melancholia in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Emma Zunz” and “El Aleph.” First, I propose a reconceptualization of mourning and melancholia. Starting from Freud’s premises, I rethink both concepts to argue that mourning is a social activity anchored on social frames and that melancholia comes from the impossibility of the social frame of mourning to carry and signify a loss. Then, I discuss how the short stories represent mourning processes that, in both cases, are difficult to achieve since the social conditions do not allow the mourner to grieve.