Cy-Borges : memories of the posthuman in the work of Jorge Luis Borges

Abstract

The contributions to this volume make us wonder what Borges, a supreme man of letters, could have known about the coming of the digital age. They foreground a paradox that careful readers of Borges's work will have already discerned, namely that even though he may speak only scantly of technology and even less of the cybercultural futures, his speculative fictions and other prose writings contrive glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more typically associated with writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or with films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. Much of this has to do with the way in which many of Borges's writings are experiments in how to make thinkable the impossible and the unconfigurable. The posthuman as that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once technology re-engineers human potential and institutes a new order, is therefore everywhere in Borges." "Cy-Borges provides radically new, "posthumanist" readings of such established Borgesian fictions as "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," "Funes the Memorious," "The Garden of Forking Paths," and "The Circular Ruins." They will be equally illuminating to readers of Hispanic and world literature, as to students of critical and cultural theory, and anybody who is fascinated with the idea of the "posthuman" and "posthumanism".