Borges’s future

The following fragments come from the conclusion of Johnson’s article:

“Borges’s determination that eternity gives time and, further, that only eternity can guarantee identity, memory, and desire, therefore must be wrong. Borges recurs to the figure of eternity to mitigate the deleterious effects of time, thus to hold on to or defer time. To save us from the passing of time, Borges uses a prophylaxis that nevertheless destroys us, since, as he argues, time is our very substance. The upshot is that the possibility of identity, memory, and desire within the Borgesian schema would require that we be immortal. But an immortal being, because it would not be susceptible to alteration, would have no need of an identity, a memory, or desire, which are constitutively temporal. No identity, no memory, no desire, without finitude, which means the possibility of identity, memory, and desire is also their impossibility” (222). 

In college I found Borges’s ideas on time to be immensely rich and probing. Now, despite Johnson’s wonder discussion of it, find them rather limiting, albeit incredibly poetic, and too dependent on a historicist organization of time. I would like to unpack the article as well as Borges’s philosophy of time a bit more in porder to compare the latter to Tristan Garcia’s ideas on time and particularly future. For that, Harman’s work on Garcia’s philosophy and especially his latest book, will prove instrumental.

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Reader of Borges

I learn a good deal from how David E. Johnson (SUNY at Buffalo) reads Borges. In his article “Time: For Borges,” he says:

“Borges retreats from the furthest implications of the understanding of the future as undetermined. In so doing, he reimports the authority of the present in the figure of eternity. In the lecture on time, he writes, “The idea of the future would turn out to justify [vendría a justificar] that ancient idea of Plato, tat time is the mobile image of eternity. If time is the image of eternity, the future would turn out to be [vendría a ser] the movement of the soul toward the future. The future would be in turn [a su vez] the return to eternity. That is to say, our life is a continual agony” (1996, 4:205). A future that returns to itself as eternity is not the future. I tis not a monster, which is how Borges designated–however provisionally–the future that remains unknown and incalculable. On the contrary, an always already determined future is the present, which, because it is not exposed to the chance and risk of the future, is necessarily inalterable” (14). 

Then, Johnson adds,

“Consequently, what Borges here calls the future figures eternity. As a result, Borges posits eternity–the absolute present, immortality–as the horizon of time, as time’s guarantor. It is toward this future eternity that we turn and to which we return to relieve ourselves of our temporal agony, to relieve ourselves of mortality. This is the metaphysical strategy. Because time is destructive, agonistic, metaphysics attempts to save us from time. To do so, it must save us from life, for life is unconditionally temporal” (14).

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Back.

I did not get to take as many photographs as I hoped. My mind was crowded with thoughts about the conference and other related matters. I simply did not feel the freedom to snap away and around. I hope that there will be another visit to SF not too far away in the future. I will share some photos soon.