Borges Between Singularity and Sovereignty

Kate Jenckes is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife, and the Writing of History and Witnessing beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina, both published by SUNY Press.

"Borges Between Singularity and Sovereignty shows the necessity of moving between these two poles—the first representing the possibility of ethical relation and the second representing the dominant political idea of the West, the attainment of mastery over oneself, one's community, and one's world. Jenckes is a sensitive reader, newly illuminating the very works that made Borges an important point of reference in the fields of world literature and philosophy and demonstrating their relevance to current debates about politics, identity, and the nature of knowledge." — Stephen Gingerich, author of This Side of Philosophy: Literature and Thinking in Twentieth-Century Spanish Letters

• Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Reading After Borges 1. World (as) War: "The Maker," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "Deutsches Requiem," "The Garden of Forking Paths" 2. Walls, Towers, Books: Borges with Kafka: "The Wall and the Books," "Kafka and His Precursors," "On Exactitude in Science" 3. Incalculable Alliances: "The Library of Babel," "The Lottery in Babylon," "On the Cult of Books," "A Defense of the Kabbalah," "Ramon Llull's Thinking Machine," "The Total Library" 4. Homo Domesticus: "The South," "Man on the Threshold" 5. Pyramids and Prophecies: "Funes the Memorious," "A History of Eternity," "The Doctrine of Cycles" 6. Unearthing the Archive: "The Aleph," "The Zahir" 7. Throwing the Race: "Avatars of the Tortoise, "The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise," "The Nothingness of Personality," "Death and the Compass" In-conclusion Notes Works Cited Index