Review of Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History

Abstract

Kate Jenckes's Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History is a study of Borges's early writings, including his poetry from the 1920s and his ^K-Ficciones writings of the 1930s, in relation to problems of time, history, politics and language. This book stands among the most original and importarit books on Borges in recent years, and is certainly a most welcome addition to Borges criticism. Especially admirable is the authors groundbreaking work in staking out commonalities between Borges and Walter Benjamin. Prior to Jenckes's book there has been little if any sustained discussion of connections between these two figures, whose names indisputably rank among the most important in Western modernity, and whose writings reflect similarly profound misgivings about the fundamental presuppositions of Western modernity. Ironically, the intellectual decision to read Borges together with Benjamin seems more likely to raise questions for North American readers (due to the obvious political, geographical, cultural and disciplinary differences that separate these two figures), whereas in the Southern Cone the names "Borges" and "Benjamin" have for some time travelled together in the same currents of intellectual debate and cultural critique.