Borges, Jorge Luis | Ian Almond (essay date 1998)
Ian Almond (essay date 1998)
SOURCE: “Tlön, Pilgrimages, and Postmodern Banality,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LXXV, No. 2, April, 1998, pp. 229–35.
[In the following essay, referring to Borges's story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Almond considers Borges's relation to postmodernism.]
When Heidegger was asked in an interview whether he could provide a single maxim for his readers to keep in their heads as they worked their way through his difficult, at times elusive writings, he replied (and the fact that he gave a reply at all is surprising): ‘Possibility is higher than actuality’.1 It is a maxim which—to use a very un-Heideggerian verb—sums up many of the philosopher's own preoccupations concerning Dasein and the world: the refutation of substance (ousia) and doing (praxis) as being ontologically superior to thought and thinking (theoria), along with the dismissal of a...
[The entire page is 3966 words long]
Navigate
