Kant's Dog

Cover

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pp. 1-4

Title Page, Copyright Page

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pp. 5-8

Contents

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pp. 9-10

Acknowledgments

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pp. 11-14

Introduction: Philosophy, Literature,and the Accidents of Translation

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pp. 15-38

1. Time: For Borges

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pp. 39-58

2. Belief, in Translation

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pp. 45-89

During a roundtable discussion devoted to the problem of translation, Derrida availed himself of Borges’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” in order to respond to a series of comments posed by Patrick Mahoney. Mahoney prefaced his remarks and question with an anecdote. After noting that “The diagnosis of schizophrenia...

3. Kant’s Dog

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pp. 91-127

Kant was notorious in Königsberg for his strict adherence to routine. He was so regular, Ernst Cassirer reports, that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks by his movements (9–10).¹ The most public articulation of this regularity was his daily walk through the city. Although it is doubtful Kant took a dog along on...

4. Decisions of Hospitality

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pp. 129-170

The preceding two chapters make clear that the contradiction of time that passes and the identity that endures can be solved through neither an empirical nor a transcendental determination of the relation of sense and understanding. The synthesis of succession, as Martin Hägglund characterizes the problem...

5. Idiocy, the Name of God

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pp. 171-211

The previous chapters have demonstrated Borges’s preoccupation for what he called the contradiction of the time that passes and the identity that endures. The Introduction argued that Borges’s principal concern is already legible in Aristotle’s understanding of time and identity and that the “contradiction” stems from what Martin Hägglund calls the philosophical problem of the synthesis...

Afterword: The Secret of Culture

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pp. 213-223

Borges’s elaboration of the name of God—across the religions of the book, Christianity, Islam, Judaism—spells out the logic of idiocy. In order to call myself, in order to name my most proper self, I must call myself in the name of the other, I must call myself from the other and thus call myself other. My singularity, the language that I speak to myself, that which is most properly...

Notes

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pp. 225-268

Index

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pp. 269-274

Back Cover

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