Visages of the Other: On a Phantasmatic Recurrence in Borges’s Fictions

Abstract

In his study of the mythic basis of Argentine nation-building (The Invention of Argentina), Nicholas Shumway offers a standard and seemingly irrefutable assessment: as a post-nationalist writer, Jorge Luis Borges conceives of Argentine modernity as taking shape through the eventual depoliticization of literature. The fact that any number of Borges' own self critical comments could be used to substantiate this claim would seem to place him well within a Western thought of politics that derives its impetus from Plato's meditations on the organization of the polis. According to this tradition, history could be described as a movement toward the completion or elimination of the political (of the strife, conflict and disorder which accompany political struggle) and the realization of a state of permanent accord. Perhaps even more profoundly than the post-ideological epoch of bureaucratic navigation imagined by Fukuyama and others in the so-called "end of history," this dream of permanence could be seen to take root in the idea of a space of absolute autonomy. For many modern discourses, this space belongs to art. Such a Utopian conception of art, envisioned as an ideal evacuation of discord and unfulfilled desire, finds in Borges' work a strong resonance with the tumultuous history of Argentine politics (and notably following the September 1930 military coup d'etat and leading up to Borges' adversarial experience with the populist-authoritarian regime of Juan Peron). In the absence of any foreseeable end to ideological conflict in Peronist Argentina, literature (or so this argument goes) represents the Utopian space of a post-political, post-nationalist existence.