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Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of by David E. Johnson - Beebo Originals E-books

Borges himself was fluent in several languages. In , he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize Prix International , which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In , he won the Jerusalem Prize.

Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of by David E. Johnson - Beebo Originals E-books

Coetzee said of him: They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo , then a poorer suburb. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence , and she spoke often of their heroic actions.

De Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.

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Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of by David E. Johnson.

Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam 24 February — 14 February [8] was a lawyer, and wrote a novel El caudillo in Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. It was published in a local journal, but Borges' friends thought the real author was his father. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the opus El caudillo.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action. Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve. His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In , the family moved to Geneva , Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe. He read Thomas Carlyle in English, and he began to read philosophy in German.

In , when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last for the remainder of his life. After World War I , the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano , Barcelona, Majorca , Seville, and Madrid. At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink 's The Golem which became influential to his work.

In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde , anti- Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , close to the Imagists.

Jorge Luis Borges

His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman , was published in the magazine Grecia. In , Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires.

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Reading Borges after Benjamin. after Benjamin Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture. bahana-line.com: Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture).

He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies". Borges co-founded the journals Prisma , a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and Proa. Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.

By the mids, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. In this vein, his biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger in inferring an autobiographically-inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to Sur , founded in by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame. They wrote a number of works together, some under the nom de plume H.

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Bustos Domecq , including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. He appears by name in Borges's Dialogue about a Dialogue , [16] in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul. The book includes two types of writing: The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works. It was in a working class area [17] and there were so few books that cataloguing more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and so look bad.

The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating. Borges's father died in , shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges suffered a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of septicemia. While recovering from the accident, Borges began playing with a new style of writing for which he would become famous.

His first story written after his accident, " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ", came out in May One of his most famous works, "Menard", examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek.

A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel. Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project. With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer.

In , he was nominated to the directorship of the National Library. By the late s, he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges: His later collection of poetry, Elogio de la Sombra In Praise of Darkness , [26] develops this theme. In the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature. As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work.

This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In , two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe.

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In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Duhan and London, Duke University Press pp. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction: Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. Borges's father died in , shortly before his 64th birthday. Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos , detectives, and historical figures. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:

Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" , [34] the Balzan Prize for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca , the Cervantes Prize all , as well as the French Legion of Honour and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country. In , Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni , through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world.

Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as Siete noches Seven Nights and Nueve ensayos dantescos Nine Dantesque Essays. His presence in on campus at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, [35] one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to the early works of JLB.

Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son.

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The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age From until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally.

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In April , a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay , in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife.

Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama "had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more "qualified". Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June , aged 86, in Geneva. He then preached that "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him.

Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found "a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins". His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.

Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in Le Nouvel Observateur August calling her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges".

Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro. Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni , in which Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties.

Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley , which have become the standard translations in English. During a conference at Columbia University , a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as "a writer's duty to his time". Borges replied, "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War.

Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think.

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I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late s, Borges described himself as a "mild" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to Marxism and communism was absorbed in his childhood. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual.

He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.

In a interview given to El Hogar , "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture. He elaborated, "Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party.

In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very fine poet" but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States.

Borges commented about Neruda, "Now he knows that's rubbish. In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed Marxist poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca , who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges' opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were. In , Argentine ultra-nationalists , sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party , asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not a true Argentine.

Both before and during the Second World War , Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay published in , Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books to inflame antisemitism. He wrote, "I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.

In a essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena 's hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it.

No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon which must have known that they were monsters collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules. In , Borges published the short story " Deutsches Requiem ", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde. In a conference at Columbia University , Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program.

He recalled, "When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler , and I think there is tragedy there.

In a interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, "And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg , of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed.

As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi. At Columbia University in , Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, "I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like.

I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed.

At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well.

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Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling Partido Justicialista were fired from government jobs. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect? At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. Bellboys babbling orders, portraits of caudillos , prearranged cheers or insults, walls covered with names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer.

In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance , as well as ' La Marseillaise '".

Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. Borges had agreed to stand for the presidency of the SADE in order [to] fight for intellectual freedom, but he also wanted to avenge the humiliation he believed he had suffered in , when the Peronists had proposed to make him an inspector of chickens. In his letter of to Attilio Rossi , he claimed that his infamous promotion had been a clever way the Peronists had found of damaging him and diminishing his reputation.

It was impossible for Borges, as president, to hold the usual reception for the distinguished visitor; instead, one of Borges' friends brought a lamb from his ranch, and they had it roasted at a tavern across the road from the SADE building on Calle Mexico. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires.

According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges' mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library. The first he described as "the criminal one", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists.

The second history was, according to Borges, "the theatrical one" composed of "tales and fables made for consumption by dolts. It is useless to list the examples; one can only denounce the duplicity of the fictions of the former regime, which can't be believed and were believed. It will be said that the public's lack of sophistication is enough to explain the contradiction; I believe that the cause is more profound. Coleridge spoke of the "willing suspension of disbelief ," that is, poetic faith; Samuel Johnson said, in defense of Shakespeare, that the spectators at a tragedy do not believe they are in Alexandria in the first act and Rome in the second but submit to the pleasure of a fiction.

Similarly, the lies of a dictatorship are neither believed nor disbelieved; they pertain to an intermediate plane, and their purpose is to conceal or justify sordid or atrocious realities. They pertain to the pathetic or the clumsily sentimental. Happily, for the enlightenment and security of the Argentines, the current regime has understood that the function of government is not to inspire pathos. I mean, he had people tortured, killed.

And his wife was a common prostitute. In a interview for National Geographic , he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand? After Borges' death in , the Peronist Partido Justicialista declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires.

A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to "certain declarations he had made about the country. During the s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina's military junta , but was scandalized by the junta's actions during the Dirty War. He also said about the war: Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes.

He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power. In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.

Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery , he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress. His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings.

Borges was a notable translator. Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine El Hogar. Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg [Notes 6] or One Thousand and One Nights , originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology El matrero.

While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus , a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. I read Sartor Resartus , and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart. In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, The Garden of Forking Paths , Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.

The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books. On the other hand, Borges was wrongly attributed some works, like the poem "Instantes". In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early s, Contorno met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation.

Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems. The Contorno writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork. Parmenides is especially in most cases learn as a turning aspect in Plato's philosophical improvement.

Almagestes se rapportait essentiellement au Langage. Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens version Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, , four. Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Extra info for Kant's Dog: It is both the structural possibility of the library as universal and the accidental articulation of the library as particular or singular.

At issue in this investment in the aesthetic is the singular and the marvelous.

The aesthetic signals the sensible inscription of the philosophical and theological idea. As sensible, the inscription is singular, marvelous. The succession of language, that it happens or passes sucede , inscribes language within the double bind of the promise. As a tradition, language is always already past, no longer; it is what we must inherit.

To speak is to promise to remember that there is language and that there is a shared heritage or community. Hence, language is to come. It is not yet. It is always possible that there will not be language, that there will not be community or communication.