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CHAPTER SEVEN The Ironies of a Blind Seer What will the indecipherable future dream? It will dream that Alonso Quijano can be Don Quijote without leaving his town and his books. It will dream that a vespers of Ulysses can be more prodigal than the poem that narrates his travails. It will dream human generations who will not recognize the name of Ulysses. It will dream dreams more precise than today’s vigil. It will dream that we will be able to do miracles and that we will not do them, because it will be more real to imagine them. It will dream worlds so intense that the voice of just one of its birds could kill you. It will dream that forgetting and memory can be voluntary acts, not aggressions or gifts of chance. It will dream that we can see with our whole body, as Milton wished from the shade of those tender orbs, his eyes. It will dream a world without machines and without that painful machine, the body. Life is not a dream, but it can become a dream, Novalis writes. —Borges, “Alguien soñará,” OF MERE TITLES When dealing with more than one vision, with a divided vision, or with a diffuse blindness, it would not be difficult to allude, despite the passage of several decades since its publication, to a binary that, in its English title enables as much the acuities of insight as the limitations of blindness. Verified by the facts and the reflections that analyze them, the foresights of Borges, those surprising anticipations of his intellectual imagination, his provocations or prophecies that as much the theories as the histories of his century continue to confirm, ever closer to his poetics, 71 we would not have to think of Paul de Man nor of the foundations of Blindness and Insight, and yet they surge, by way of reductive, almost mechanical associations, from a rereading that neither directs them nor puts them aside. It follows from this that, reviewing the variations of a literary perspicacity that impede dialectically aesthetic forms articulated by unforeseeable contradictions, paradoxes that resolve into coincidences, I would not avoid getting even with a theoretical position whose controversial critical elaborations continue to mark the well-trodden mystery of conjunctions that do not attenuate opposition but, on the contrary enter into it in order to treat as finished a game that, in reality—or in its allegories— does not end. Nevertheless, in the first place we would have to resolve a question of terms or, rather, “of mere titles,” as Borges says in “The Blind Man.”1 In the same way as one of the first books that Borges wrote was titled Inquisitions,2 a mention that he inscribed as a kind of threshold in order to make way for a new literary space not conditioned by the deviances of history, where he declared from the beginning his intention of unburdening the concept of the violence of conversions, of exiles, and of bonfires, it would be more simple to unburden blindness and insight, as much as its adverse combination, of semantic “occupation” (Besetzung the Germans would say, as if referring to the occupation of a city by an enemy army or by themselves) that reduces them to the simplifications of one sole authority or one sole author. In the second place, it would be necessary to make way for a hypothesis . Despite the fact that that he does not usually say or indicate it, it is certain that Paul de Man was well acquainted with Borges’s work. It may even be supposed that he came to know him personally when Borges was invited to Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor in 1967, a university where de Man was himself professor between 1950 and 1960 and from which he does seem to have distanced himself too much afterward. Furthermore, at Yale University, more than a colleague, de Man had been one of Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s friends (1969–1985). Rodríguez Monegal has been the most fanatic Borgologist, Borgian, Borgist, even in the early days when Borges was only appreciated by a limited group of connoisseurs . So much so that not only was Emir the scholar most knowledgeable concerning the life and work of Borges, as Umberto Eco recognized while Borges was still alive,3 but also some one who, for many reasons, biographical and literary, slipped that third person—the proper noun constant in his dialogue—toward the first...

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