Fernando de Toro

1. Fernando de Toro • Borges Derrida and Writing

2. Fernando de Toro • BORGES BEFORE THE POST • THE BOOK THAT IS NOT • RE-READING/RE-WRITING • THE INSTABILITY OF THE SIGN

3. Borges Derrida and Writing • 1. BORGES BEFORE THE POST • Today, when we look back and reflect on the criticism that Borges received, at least until the end of the 1970s, it is easy to attest that most of it was practiced out-of-context, that is outside the Post. • This Post, which has been so much debated, vilified, defended, and denied, is both the Post that Borges inscribed in the late 1930s and that which inscribed Borges in the late 1970s.

4. Borges Derrida and Writing • Whatever position one chooses to assume, the fact remains that Borges’ literary practice could not be read until the reading codes changed, until the epistemological field entered an unprecedented re-thinking and the very logos of the West was confronted. • It is for this very reason that Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and others have been particularly attracted to Borges.

5. Borges Derrida and Writing • In 1966, in the Preface to The Order of Things (1994), Michel Foucault starts with Borges’ taxonomy in “The Analytic Language of John Wilkins”; two years later, Derrida begins his “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1981) with two quotations on writing from Borges’ “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”, and from the famous “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Again in 1981, Baudrillard starts Simulations (1983) with another well-known text by Borges: “On Exactitude in Science”.

6. Borges Derrida and Writing • These three authors quote Borges for radically different reasons: Foucault because of “naming”, Derrida because of writing, and Baudrillard because of simulation and hyperreality. • There is, however, something in Borges’ texts that not only weds these authors in particular, but also embodies Post-Modern, Post-Theoretical, and de-constructionist thinking in general.

7. Borges Derrida and Writing • From the late 1980s onwards there has been a new wave of Borgesian studies from this Post-Modernist/Post-Structuralist/Deconstructionist perspective. • The intent of this paper is to establish a dialogue between Borges and Derrida pertaining to the question of writing and phonocentrism, and the structure of the linguistic sign.

8. Borges Derrida and Writing • Thus, my aim is, rather, to compare and contrast the surprising proximity of thought between Borges and Derrida, particularly in terms of writing, reading and the instability of the signifier with respect to the signified. • 2.RE-READING/RE-WRITING • Perhaps the most important change which has taken place in the theory of literature and literary criticism from the late 1970s to the present is hermeneutic activity:

9. Borges Derrida and Writing • specifically, reading as a form of inquiry, a form drastically rejected by structuralist logocentrism, a form which has become a pivotal and dominant practice. • To this new hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminism, Post-Colonialism, and now Post-Theory, have made major contributions and, at the same time, have radically altered theoretical practices.

10. Borges Derrida and Writing • And couple with intertextuality, which became the raw material for the artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century. • However, Borges was the very first to realize with absolute clarity that the Modernist paradigm, which for all intents and purposes was dead by the end of the 1920s, had in fact concluded. • There was a new ideation of arts, literature, and culture in general in the workings and he, Borges, was placed at its very inception.

11. Borges Derrida and Writing • References to this awareness can be found in almost all of Borges works. • The meta-fictional components of his works, in fact, always refer to this change/awareness. • In the following metafictional passage of “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”, we read:

12. Borges Derrida and Writing • Menard (perhaps without wishing to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. This technique, with its infinite applications, urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid, and to read Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. (1962: 54-55).

13. Borges Derrida and Writing • This new technique is reading as writing, a very Borgesian aesthetic practice and a theme that travels through all his work: reading, re-writing, palimpsest, rhizome, simulation, intertextuality. • It is of the utmost importance to emphasize that Borges does not say that this “new technique” has enriched the art of writing, but rather the art of reading. • It is this very same theme that Derrida will make central to both Of Grammatology (1967) and Dissemination (1972).

14. Borges Derrida and Writing • When Derrida refers to this change, a change that Borges had already seized thirty years before, he does it in much the same terms as the latter: • […] beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (1974: 86-87).

15. Borges Derrida and Writing • In connection to reading, Derrida, in Of Grammatology, speaks of the trace as the already there, as différance which allows the generation of meaning. • The trace is intimately connected to the notion of arche-writing, as that which precedes any form of graphie and also any form of presence or phonocentrism. • In fact, what Derrida exposes, not only in Of Grammatology but also in Dissemination, is that writing precedes speech, and that spoken language is a form of writing.

16. Borges Derrida and Writing • Thus, the Saussurian binarism of langue/parole is deconstructed, and with it, the signifier/signified binarism. • The unsettling of this binarism has lasting consequences since the very structure of the Sign (signifier/signified) is put into question. Derrida stresses:

17. Borges Derrida and Writing • […] that the signified is originaily and essentially (and not only for a finite created spirit) trace, that is, is always already in the position of the signifier, is the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource. (1974: 73) • Writing is that which cannot be defined. It is not an exterior, it has no origin and always precedes speech.

18. Borges Derrida and Writing • This is why, for Derrida, the colloquial use of “writing” has nothing to do with his notion of writing, since the latter is always related to graphie, whereas the former it is not welded to any form of “plenitude expression” (1974: 62-63): reading, writing, arche-writing, differance, trace, become synonymous terms. • For Borges, as we indicated above, reading is also writing and in fact is first and foremost writing.

19. Borges Derrida and Writing • In “Kafka and His Precursors”, he provides us with an excellent example of writing as trace, arche-writing: • I once premeditated making a study of Kafka's precursors. At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoneix of rhetorical praise; after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods. I shall record a few of these here, in chronological order. (1964: 199)

20. Borges Derrida and Writing • What Borges recognises is precisely the trace, the arche-writing, since what he identifies from Kafka is his “voice”, his “habits” in literatures of the past; • it is not the past recognized in the present (Kafka) but the present recognised in the past.

21. Borges Derrida and Writing • The basic Borgesian position is that everything has already been written and said, therefore the only option a writer has is to “write notes, upon imaginary books” (Ficciones, 1962: 17) since “[…] the composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes!” (1962: 15).

22. Borges Derrida and Writing • The series of examples that Borges provides to the reader in order to expose Kafka's traces in the past are, in themselves, a trace, since the chain that is established is “Borges/Kafka/the trace”:

23. Borges Derrida and Writing • […] the form of this illustrious problem [Zeno’s paradox] is, exactly, that of The Castle, and the moving object and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkian characters in literature. In the second text which chance laid before me, the affinity is not one of form but one of tone. It is an apologue of Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century [...]. (Borges, 1964: 199) • The third text derives from a more easily predictable source: the writings of Kierkegaard. The affinity of both writers is something of which no one is ignorant [...]. (Borges, 1964: 200)

24. Borges Derrida and Writing • Borges accomplishes two operations with these texts. • On the one hand, he traces the trace in Kakfa’s writing; on the other hand, he discloses and displays his own writing system - one inscribed solely on the trace, on the arche-writing and the play of différance. • In fact, as Alfonso de Toro has indicated, the trace in Borges is disclosed by an “affinity” or a “tone” found in the works of authors of the past such as Carlyle, De Quincy, Russel, Berkeley, Kakfa, etc. (1994: 248).

25. Borges Derrida and Writing • What Borges says about Kafka, therefore, can also be applied to him. In the same text, Borges comments: “In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality” (1964: 201). • This comment has particular consequences: we recognize Kafka’s writing in the trace, but at the same time, in the same movement, undecidibility and différance are inscribed since the only manner by which we are able to trace the trace is by Kafka’s writing.

26. Borges Derrida and Writing • Without Kafka, writing does not exist. This undecidibility (Kafka/trace/Kafka/trace) introduced by Borges joins Derrida's thought when he declares that: • The (pure) trace is différance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.) concept or operation, motor or sensory. (1974: 62)

27. Borges Derrida and Writing • “Kafka and His Precursors” completely dislodges the ex-novo attitude of Modernity and its many -isms, ironising his own first readings of Kafka himself: • “At first I had considered him to be as singular as the phoenix of rhetorical praise”; • only to discover the trace, the true Kafka: • “after frequenting his pages a bit, I came to think I could recognize his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods” [1964: 199]).

28. Borges Derrida and Writing • For Borges all that exits is reading, that is, writing, since to write is nothing more than to re-write what you have read. • Yet as Borges states, even this reading/re-writing can be performed “on imaginary books” (1962: 16).

29. Borges Derrida and Writing • Similar to “Kafka and His Precursors” is “The Homeric Versions” (2000) and “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw” (1964) where Borges suggests that there is only one Book where everything is contained and insists on the activity of reading/writing. • In “The Homeric Versions” he states: • With famous books, the first time is actually the second, for we begin them already knowing them. The prudent common phrase “rereading the classics” is the result of an unwitting truth. (2000: 69-70)

30. Borges Derrida and Writing • In this text Borges attributes a particular characteristic to “famous books”, arguing that before we read them, we already know them, since these books are in themselves the Book of Books, an entire library.

31. Borges Derrida and Writing • In the next paragraph Borges stresses this point: • […] the Odyssey, thanks to my opportune ignorance of Greek, is an international bookstore of words in prose and in verse, from Champman’s couplets to Andrew Lang’s “Authorized Version” or Bédard’s classic French drama or Morris’ vigorous saga or Butler’s ironic bourgeois novel. (Borges, 2000: 70) • Thus, the Odysseybecomes the Books of Books or the arche-writing and the trace.

32. Borges Derrida and Writing • It is particularly revealing that Borges refers to theOdyssey, since this text is considered to be the very beginning of Western literature. • In it, all writing has already been inscribed: the Odyssey is Différance (non-self-presence), since, according to Derrida, “Differance is therefore the formation of form” and “[…] on the other hand [is] the being-imprinted of the imprint” [re-writing]1974: 63).

33. Borges Derrida and Writing • This is so because writing is neither interior nor exterior to language. • Writing is a gap which implies a marking and erasure: a hymen, an exterior/interior and, in fact, a pharmakon. (Derrida, 1981: 61-171). • The Odyssey is, according to Borges, an “international library” due to its power of dissemination, of the graft “without a body proper, of the skew without a straight line, of the bias without a front” (Derrida, 1981: 11).

34. Borges Derrida and Writing • The other implicit notion present in Borges’ text is writing as repetition, as simulacrum, but a repetition/simulacrum which is never the same or identical to itself. • In “The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader” (1999), Borges emphasizes the superior faculty of writing, at least at the level of the transmission of experience.

35. Borges Derrida and Writing • It is, for Borges, as if the graft/graph were inscribed on the surface of the text, since the trace, enacted as dissemination, overpowers presence and phonocentricism.

36. Borges Derrida and Writing • 3. THE BOOK THAT IS NOT • Borges and Derrida proclaim a book that is not, not only because it has already been written, but also because the book is infinite. • It does not exist yet, it does exist; it inscribes and it is inscribed. • As the book is destroyed, it is replaced by the text, a new form of inscribing, a new form of writing.

37. Borges Derrida and Writing • Regarding the destruction of the book, Derrida states: • If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary. (1974: 18) • This denudation of “the surface of the text” is precisely the deliverance of the text as a rhizomatic surface that can never be completely inscribed or exhausted.

38. Borges Derrida and Writing • It is, in fact, open-ended. Borges, in “The Book of Sand” uses “book” in the same sense as text when he quotes the unknown man who “told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither sand nor this book has beginning or end” (1999: 481).

39. Borges Derrida and Writing • In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Borges proclaims that: • In literary matters too, the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and anonymous. (1962: 28). • This new textuality and writing becomes evident by dismantling mimesis and the linear narrative model, and announces what is going to become a normalized postmodern practice.

40. Borges Derrida and Writing • In terms of Western narrative Borges is one of the very first to inscribe a new literary paradigm by “not considering literature as a ‘mimesis of reality’ but rather as a partial and illusory ‘literary mimesis’ based on the multiplication of organised codes according to the principle of the rhizome”, as Alfonso de Toro has indicated (1994: 237).

41. Borges Derrida and Writing • In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Borges introduces this new paradigm: • Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. (1962: 17)

42. Borges Derrida and Writing • The emphasis on the “handful of readers” reveals Borges’ awareness of the introduction of a new code whose decodification will be possible only by those capable of reading in a new manner.

43. Borges Derrida and Writing • If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently. (Derrida, 1974: 87) • For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model. Which is to say the epic model. (Derrida, 1974: 87)

44. Borges Derrida and Writing • It is this ‘epic model’ that Borges deconstructs, creating a minimalist writing founded on intertextuality, simulation, palimpsest, and rhizome, as I indicated above. • But he also erases the distinctions and binarisms of fiction/reality, theory/practice, author/reader, writing/reading, etc.

45. Borges Derrida and Writing • The erasure is typically revealed in his role as reader and particularly as editor of writings belonging to others. • Borges’ work is full of this Cervantinian literary device, but with one major exception: for Borges, editorship is not simply a rhetorical device but a writing practice connected to the act of reading/writing. • If everything has been written, the only role that an author can assume is that of editor or, at best, as commentator on the writings of others.

46. Borges Derrida and Writing • 4. THE INSTABILITY OF THE SIGN • After Dissemination and Of Grammatology our thinking about the sign changed due to the fact that the classical Saussurian relationship between signifier and signified was broken. • What was revealed is that the signifier does not contain in itself anything that can inscribe it in the signified, therefore what we are left with is a mass of signifiers (floating) with no fixed signifieds.

47. Borges Derrida and Writing • As a result, the signified is always sliding under the signifier. • Jorge Luis Borges was fully aware of this slippery nature of the signified, particularly with respect to writing. • If the “formal essence of the signified is presence, and the privilege of its proximity to the logos as phonè is the privilege of presence” (Derrida, 1974: 18), then the signified can only be slippery and always slides under the signifier.

48. Borges Derrida and Writing • Thus, the signifier always presents itself as an autonomous chain, in the Lacanian sense; that is, the autonomy of the signifying chain from the signified, or “the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (Lacan, 1966: 260). • The well-known Saussurian formulation of the sign = signifier/signified and its binary opposition is radically challenged by Borges throughout his work. In Brodie’s Report we read:

49. Borges Derrida and Writing • The word nrz for example, suggests dispersion or spots of one kind or another; it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered, with water and mud, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows a defeat.

50. Borges Derrida and Writing • Hrl, on the other hand, indicates that which is compact, dense or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors, sexual congress, or a forest.