Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation

Notes

Notes THE INTERPRETIVE FIX AND THE FIXATIONS OF FICTION 1. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans, Frank M. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239–276. 2. Block de Behar, Una palabra propiamente dicha (Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores, 1994). 3. Block de Behar, Borges ou les gestes d’un voyant aveugle, traduit de l’espagnol par Patrice Toulouse (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1998). 4. Block de Behar, Una retórica del silencio. Funciones del lector y los procedimientos de la lectura literaria (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1984); A Rhetoric of Silence and Other Selected Writings (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995). 5. Hamlet, II.ii. 6. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, autor del quijote,” in Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 444–450. 7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 37. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 154. 9. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, ed. Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), 218–268. 165 10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s papers on Technique. 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), 42. 11. Although the actual German adds a letter, again the omnipresent n, the unknown of pure change, to the nth degree: redner; a reder is rather one who builds ships. 12. Wörter und Zahlen, Das Alphabet als Code (Vienna/New York: Springer, 2000). 13. Ibid., 7. 14. His whole thought deals with this problem, but was first expounded in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5. 16. And yet Kabbalah, as Bloom has said, is not mysticism, but interpretation , “a theory of writing.” Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1975), 52. 17. Chapter 6 of this book. 18. Etymology, what Deleuze and Guattari call “a specifically philosophical athleticism” (ibid., 8), is one of Block de Behar’s cherished tools. Her analysis of the relation between chance and fall appears in chapter 8. 1. FIRST WORDS 1. Jorges Luis Borges, Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores , 1974), 522–544. 2. Ibid., 444–450. 3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (NY: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 455. 4. August of 1999 marked the centennial of Borges’s birth. Beyond the chronological precision of commemorations, the intention of this book was to contribute to his constant celebration. 5. Perlas de la sabiduría judía (Antología de los hagiógrafos y de Pirké Avot), 2ª edición bilingüe ampliada (Buenos Aires: Editorial Yehuda), 317. 6. There is a connotation of the phrase cita sin fin that “Endless quotation” does not capture, namely, that of a cinta sin fin, or tape recorder on auto-reverse, a metaphor of audio reproduction that resonates with Lisa Block de Behar’s notion of the quotation. [W.E.] 166 Borges 2. VARIATIONS ON A LETTER AVANT-LA-LETTRE 1. Blanqui, L’éternité par les astres. Hypothèse astronomique, ed. L. B. de Behar (Genève: Fleuron-Slatkine, 1996), 149. 2. English in the original. 3. Borges, Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1974), 712. 4. Rodríguez Monegal, “Borges y la nouvelle critique,” Revista Iberoamericana (July–Sept., 1972): 367–390; Borges par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 5. Gregory Ulmer, “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in Jonathan Culler, ed., On Puns. The Foundation of Letters (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 164–189. 6. Obras, 173. 7. Ibid., 773. 8. See Lisa Block de Behar, “El milagro de la rosa o el ultrarrealismo de Borges,” in Al margen de Borges (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 1987), 193–210, and “Le seuil d’autres mondes: l’ultraréalisme de Borges et Bioy Casares en regard de Walter Bejamin et Louis Auguste Blanqui,” in Nouveau monde autres mondes (Paris: Pleine Marge 5, 1995), 75–92. 9. Obras, 847. 10. Ibid., 801–802. 11. Ibid., 802. 12. The following depends on the double meaning of the Spanish word parábola: parable and parabola [W.E]. 13. Ibid., 441. 14. Ibid., 440. 15. Ibid., 773. 16. Roland Barthes, “Le bruissement de la langue...