Aesthetics, Politics and Event: Borges’s “El fin,” the Argentine Tradition and Death

Abstract

This essay takes up the relationship between literary aesthetics and the critique of nationalism in Jorge Luis Borges. I begin with a critical overview of Josefina Ludmer’s genealogy of the gaucho genre and then turn to Borges’s “Elfin,” which by my reading, poses a number of challenges, not only to the ideology of cultural nationalism, but also to Ludmer’s attempts to distinguish between the popular and its aestheticization.