The unrelated future : Borges, posthumanism, and the temptations of analogy

Abstract

The work of Jorge Luis Borges appears to have little time for technology. The first impression must be of a body of work keyed more toward inventio than inventions. Design and innovation are everywhere in Borges, but what they tend to mediate is not industrial or digital instrument but literary language and form. Indeed, it is curious how relatively device- and enginefree the work of Borges, a twentieth- century writer, is. Funes relies on no mnemonics and no hypermnesic assistance for his memorious feats, the Library of Babel does not have so much as a card catalog, and few wheels turn on the forking paths of Borges’s fictions. To speak concurrently of cyborgs and Borges, therefore, is to be beguiled by what Gregory L. Ulmer calls a puncept: a concept that comes to mind on the basis of a pun.3 That is not auspicious. True: the Addisonian equation of puns with ‘‘False Wit’’ is uncompelling in an age when literary theory has proceeded through coinages like lituraterre or otobiographies, but there remains a degree of irrepressible unease in the thought of founding a project for critical investigation, a book like this one, on what is in effect a mot d’esprit that becomes enshrined in a title: Cy-Borges. How can that be justified to those uncharmed by the inventio? [excerpt]