Borges and Levinas Face-to-Face: Writing and the Riddle of Subjectivity

Borges asserts that every writer simultaneously inscribes the particular line he is writing and creates an image of himself. How does writing that re-creates the author's image work? What is the "Otherness" that erupts from the depths of subjectivity? These questions are examined in relation to Levinas's discussion of the rupture of the logic of identity within paternal relations and subjectivity's transformation into a paradoxical "trans-substantiality"—split into the same and Other. Borges, following an examination of the images of Shakespeare and Whitman, suggests that the dialectic of birth and alterity occurs within subjectivity, in an introvertive move in which the Other emerges during the event of the act of writing.