Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation by David E. Johnson’s (review)

“el perro de kant”: time, borges, kant’s dog

Humor is not usually counted among the traits of good literary criticism. Kant’s Dog announces itself with an apparent joke, and in the third chapter, which shares the book’s name minus the subtitle, we are told that Borges takes Kant’s dog out for a walk in the park. Johnson explains that, by way of this canine constitutional, Borges offers a critique of transcendental philosophy’s grounding of concepts of knowledge. Though the level of wit is never as high as in “Kant’s Dog,” Johnson carries out a similar critical operation in each chapter of his book. He confronts Borges’s texts with philosophical figures and texts to which Borges alludes in Ficciones and elsewhere, and sometimes with things to which Borges does not, in fact, allude. Indeed, some of Johnson’s points of reference would have to be avant la lettre; discussions of Derrida and Derrida scholars Rodolphe Gasché and Martin Hågglund set the philosophical bar high. Other references—to Kant’s dog, Schopenhauer’s cat, the idiot god, and an in-born, mechanical human heart—clearly exist neither in reality nor in Borges’s texts. Not only does Borges walk Kant’s dog. He also refutes, time and again, Aristotle’s, then Augustine’s, then Heidegger’s understanding of time. He tries Hume’s faith in the external world. He shakes Aristotle’s confidence in the possibility of a stable, unequivocal basis for ethical decision. Invoking the texts of all three major Abrahamic religions, he calls God to the stand in order to spell out an ethics of immortality. On the one hand, Johnson is one kind of reader that Borges engenders: a scholar willing to chase down allusions and work out intricate interplay of text and intertext. But also, as we shall see, his dazzling display of expertise gives priority to thinking through, again, and beyond (if thinking through is not always also beyond) the problems that occupied Borges.

Chapter 3, “Kant’s Dog,” can give us a good sense of the book as a whole. Those who know anything about Kant the man probably know of his daily walks. What we didn’t picture was the dog that accompanied him, restrained in accordance with a “philosophical leash law” meant to keep him from running amok and causing his owner unexpected trouble. Johnson frames his third chapter with this story, suggested by a “key moment” in “Funes the Memorious” (91). We are reminded that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant “trots out” a dog at the precise point at which he sets out to establish the objective validity of concepts drawn from sense experience. In other words, when Kant wants to explain how the understanding manages to turn the manifold of sensation into comprehensible units, he chooses as an example our recognition of a dog as a dog. How can we say that what we see is a dog? This is the work of imagination, which often appears to be Johnson’s main concern. Neither passive nor active, neither sense nor understanding, interior nor exterior, it “inscribes the transcendental” (93). That is to say, it makes the universality of knowledge possible. But its inscription also “singularizes the universal,” ruining the purity of traditional categories of reality or materiality and of subjectivity or conceptuality. The imagination “makes it possible to see and name, to know or to recognize, a dog as a dog,” yet it does so at the price of “(making) it impossible that the dog will ever be one” (93).

Johnson notes that Borges’s narrator in “Funes” also evokes a dog as an illustration of Funes’s discomfort that what is called a dog one minute should retain the same name the next minute. This is Kant’s dog, says Johnson, and this chapter shows how Borges’s text, by virtue of Funes...