Borges' disjunctions: some notes on war and fiction
Abstract
This article reads anew the politics of Jorge Luis Borges’ texts. In dialogue with Michel Foucault’s seminars and Bruno Latour, it traces the figures of war in some of Borges’ canonical texts from the 1930s and 1940s: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “Poema conjectural,” “El milagro secreto,” “El arte narrativo y la magia,” “El sur” and “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan.” Thus, I show the relevance of the conflict between irreconcilable worlds to Borges’ notion of fiction. The latter could be described as a twofold operation, which, on the one hand, dissolves all frames of intelligibility of the conflict (be it national, worldly, or universal), and, on the other hand, turns this very dissolution into a potential for the emergence of new worlds.Keywords:
Jorge Luis Borges, politics of literature, war, fiction, world literature, postcoloniality, ontological turnReferences
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