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William
Egginton and David E. Johnson, Eds.
Thinking With Borges
Thinking With Borges
engages the most pressing and persistent questions of the
philosophical tradition—including those of time, eternity,
politics, law, justice, language, reality, memory—through
original and often brilliant readings of the Borgesian
archive.
Eschewing the tired debate as to whether Borges is a writer
or a thinker and going beyond Borges’s own self-deprecating
claims that he deployed the philosophical canon only for
aesthetic purposes, the contributors to
Thinking With Borges
demonstrate that he seeks to answer the most enduring
philosophical questions in ways that both contest and extend
the philosophical tradition. The essays included in
Thinking With Borges
take seriously Borges’s references to Heidegger, Kant,
Spinoza, and Wilkins, among so many others. In short, rather
than providing a mere catalogue of the philosophers, schools
of thought, and themes that appear in Borges's writing,
Thinking With Borges
represents a sustained reflection on Borges's contribution
to the art of thinking. In essays whose topics range from
Borges's relation to Jewish mysticism to the paradoxes of
time in his fiction, from the decision and constitution of
the enemy to the impossible possibility of the law, the
authors gathered in this volume show time and again how
Borges's writing undermines any facile distinction between
literature and philosophy.
Table of
Contents:
David E.
Johnson
Introduction:
Borges and the Letter of Philosophy
Stephen Gingerich
Nothing and
Everything: Theoretical and Practical Nihilism in Borges
Bruno Bosteels
Borges as Antiphilosopher
William
Egginton
Three Versions of Divisibility: Borges, Kant, and the
Quantum
Krzysztof Ziarek
The "Fiction"
of Possibility
Santiago Colás
The Difference that Time Makes: Hopelessness and Potency
in
Borges's 'El Aleph'
Brett Levinson
Crossbreeds: Aesthetics Misencounters Politics in "El
evangelio según Marcos"
Alberto Moreiras
Newness, World Language, Alterity: On Borges's Mark
Kate Jenckes
Borges Before the Law
Eva Horn
Borges's
Duels: Friends, Enemies, and the Fictions of History
Lisa Block de
Behar
Antecedents of an Unexpected Poetic Affinity: Jorge Luis
Borges
as Reader
of Martin Buber
"In
the worldly sense in which literature and philosophy ought
to connect with social hope or else perish into irrelevance,
the writings of Jorge Luis Borges speak to the philosopher
at risk in any reader. This effervescent, learned, and
burning-bright collection of essays represents the best
effort yet to keep the dialogue alive. I am keeping it under
my pillow and on occasions will read it aloud to the
philosopher I would love to love."
— Eduardo González, The Johns Hopkins University
The Editors:
William Egginton is professor of German and Romance
Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University
where he teaches courses on Spanish and Latin American
literature, literary theory, and the relation between
literature and philosophy. 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). He is also co-editor with
Mike Sandbothe of The
Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (2004), and translator of
Lisa Block de Behar's
Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation (2003).
David E. Johnson is associate
professor and chair of the Department of Comparative
Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where he
teaches Latin American literature and continental
philosophy.
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.
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