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CHAPTER NINE The Paradoxes of Paradoxes Now we do not define each deed that incites our song; we cipher it in one sole word that is the Word. —Borges, “UNDR” In this case it would be valid to modify the formula of the Hebrew superlative, since it is not only a question of distinguishing a level of superiority that exalts a king of kings for being the greatest, or a song of songs that was the best and is his. Despite these grammaticized excellences , it is necessary to point out that the superlative used here is not applied in order to exalt in the same way. Similarly, Borges announces in his book Prologues1 the presentation of a “prologue of prologues.” I would be interested in anticipating by way of this double plural the apex of paradoxes that Borges’s oeuvre and its author multiply, those of a Borges, who writes, and the other, who also does. I would not want to attribute solely to the Balkan hospitality of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, to his convocation to reflect, in Dubrovnic, in 1989, on “Collapses, paradoxes, cognitive dissonances,” the necessity to recur thematically to Borges’s paradoxical imagination with such naturalness. Above all because, attending to themes of this nature, naturalness could be alarming. It is true that if unforeseeability constitutes one of the conditions of the paradox, then dealing with paradoxes one need not speak of Borges nor, dealing with Borges, would it be necessary to speak of paradoxes : “in the Koran there are no camels; this absence of camels would be enough to prove that it is not Arabic.”2 For this reason, these reflections are initiated in the key of preterition , a figure that seems to me more paradoxical than paradoxes themselves , although, as it is limited to accessory metadiscursive rhetorical recourses, one does not always remember that in saying that one does not 107 say what one says, the rhetorical figure reveals one of the complicated dualities that are a condition of the word. Between paradoxes and preteritions would be the sententious occurrence of the first and the perverse redundancy of the second, two of the scarce differences between figures that have in common an ambivalent autoreferential renvoi: without interrupting the consecutiveness of discourse, they are terms that remit it to itself, formulating a verbal autoreferentiality at the same time as they suspend it. The suspended reference remains and does not, goes and comes, as much what one says as what one does not say is said, is negated, and is maintained.3 Paradoxical literature has always existed, but there are works and moments in which this frequency explodes, and it is already difficult to pass them by, their lights and blinding flashes. Borges is a paradoxical event of such a kind that his analysis would overflow the specifics of whatever description, or the limits of inventory. Because of the logical vastness and variety of this recourse, one of the first problems would be to pose again the question, Where to begin? But the beginning, in the same way as the end, once mentioned, moves away. There is always a discourse or witness that refers the phrase, the judgment, the solution, the catastrophe, like the messengers who recount the calamities of Job to Job and believe, or say, that they exist only to recount to him his misfortunes. Through the word, even the greatest disasters, verbalized, are normalized. From the moment that someone recounts it, once it is named, the ending becomes a deferred end, postponed; through the phrase, mentioned, the beginning also becomes posterior. Because of something “at the beginning ,” at the beginning of Genesis, as “Bereshit” was translated, does not begin with aleph but with the next letter. In the indicative ambiguities that deixis claims to avoid, the uttered beginning refers to itself from the beginning, two times: “In the beginning was the Word.” In the same way, in the oft-discussed “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the initial autoreferentiality formulated as deixis (ceci: this) is part of an indication of circularity that problematizes the formulation. Perhaps more than the Beginning, it was in the End that there was the Word: “début” is a beginning that in French would seem to negate the end from the beginning. Hegel had always observed this complex circularity: “The result is the same thing as the beginning because the beginning is the end (parce que le commencement est le but / weil der Anfang Zweck ist).”4 Similar to the...

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