This session proposal invites renewed attention to the matter of how the existential and ontological concerns of philosophy interact with literary concerns of narration, figuration, and disclosure in the fiction and essayistic writings of Jorge Luis Borges. In recent years, Borges scholars have increasingly turned to archival research, documentation, and description in advancing our understanding of the idiosyncratic creative process employed by the Argentine writer. This archival work has contributed important insights about how Borges treated reading and writing as inseparably interwoven domains; the genetic focus on unearthing hidden bibliographic sources has revealed the surprising degree to which Borges “borrowed” from other sources in his own writing. However, the growing sway of "genetic" and empirical approaches to Borges scholarship does not address one of the unresolved fundamental problems in Borges criticism: the question of classification and its relation to knowledge. By classification we understand both the matter of literary genre (Borges was a prolific producer of short stories, poetry, and essays, and while each of these distinct literary modes can be said to generate their own effects, the distinctions between them are not always clear and, for Borges, the indistinction or porosity between genres is itself an important feature of literature) and the issue of literature and its relation to other disciplines—most notably, philosophy, but Borges also experimented with concepts and problems from mathematics and theoretical physics. Our session highlights aspects of Borges’s work that lie beyond the reach of archival research, such as the relation between reading, thinking, and disclosure of meaning in a world that increasingly presents itself as having been produced (and perhaps also destroyed) by human hands.

The session includes four presenters, each of whom will limit their presentation to no more than 12 minutes, thereby allowing at least 15 minutes for free, unstructured discussion. The session moderator will be responsible for enforcing time limits for each paper.

Dove’s paper proposes that Borges’s essay writings illuminate a connection between philosophy and literary language with respect to understanding how humans enter into a meaningful relationship to the world around them, as well as how such relationships are threatened by the proliferation of nihilism and its attendant phenomena (will to power, calculation, and the abstract logics of modern systems).The paper draws from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as his lectures on Nietzsche and nihilism. Jenckes’s paper discusses how contemporary feminist appropriations of Freud and his account of the uncanny can help open up new ways of understanding Borges’s lifelong interest in Nietzsche and the theme of the eternal return. Levinson’s paper explores the theme of the remainder or the excess in Borges’s oeuvre; drawing from Derrida’s writings on the archive, he proposes that Borges’s well-known interest in intertextuality harbors interpretive possibilities and epistemological insights that have yet to be exploited by Borges criticism, in particular concerning the relationship between border and the ideas of totality and the whole. Moreno’s paper looks at a pair of poems by Borges while proposing that Borges’s interest in highlighting the dynamic aspects of language (verbs, adverbs, etc.) over its static, nominal components provides a site for possible dialogue with Alfred North Whitehead’s “process philosophy,” a school of thought that associates the reality of the real with ongoing, dynamic processes rather than with unchanging entities and identities..

Presenters have been selected in an effort to represent a diverse range of perspectives including: junior faculty (Moreno) and senior scholars (Dove, Jenckes, Levinson); gender of presenter; and methodological perspectives (feminism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Anglo-American philosophy, and poststructuralism).