Kant's Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation

5. Idiocy, the Name of God

5 Idiocy, the Name of God 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 of succession. In rearticulating the relation of time to identity, it was possible to rethink the relation of the accidental to the necessary, of the singular to the universal, of literature to philosophy. In Chapters 2 and 3 attention to this contradiction made it possible to foment Borgesian “deconstructions” of Humean empiricism and Kantian transcendentalism, that is, on the one hand, to read in Hume the necessarily transcendental moment of “belief,” a belief that could never be determined empirically; and, on the other hand, to read in Kant the necessary instance of a monogrammaticality that could never be comprehended or accounted for transcendentally. In both Hume and Kant, the imagination plays the decisive part in that, in its capacity as automatic translating machine, it is, to quote Rodolphe Gasché, “the operator of différance.” Chapter 4 pursued the implications of the first three chapters through the problem of metaphor, analogy, and homonymy. The temporal structure of infinite referral and deferral or, more simply, infinite homonymy, led to the conclusion that Being is in name only (homonumus), hence accidental. This had implications for how to understand Borges’s conception of the present and possibility , as well as for his understanding of the structure of decision, which, in Borges, is always ruined by undecidability. This chapter extends the 171 172 Kant’s Dog implications of the notion of translation (displacement, metaphoricity or constitutive homonymy, originary technicity) developed throughout the previous chapters to Borges’s consideration of the name of God. At stake in the infinite referral and deferral of translation is the impossibility of the name (and) of God. In taking up the necessary temporalization of God’s self-nomination—whether in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—God’s idiocy is revealed as the only possible revelation. The spacing of the aleph Two moments in “El Aleph” provide the points of departure. The first is Borges’s recognition of the impossibility of narrating the Aleph, of describing it, without, at the same time and in the very narrative that describes it, destroying its effect: “I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?” (1996, 1.624/CF 282). Borges suggests that language works as a device for communication only insofar as its conventionality—the implicit agreement of all interlocutors that words mean or refer to the same things, that is, to the same other words—depends on a shared past, on a common inheritance or tradition. Consequently, the language I use cannot be singularly my own. An idiolect, a strictly private language, is impossible. To the extent Borges accepts this premise, he effectively acknowledges that not only Carlos Argentino Daneri’s words are insubstantial—“his vapid chatter [sus palabras insustanciales]” (1.624/CF 282)—but that all words are, because the dream of a substantial word is the dream of the end of language in that a substantial word would be a word that does not refer, not even to itself. The dream of a substantial word would be the dream of the absolute reduction of the difference between words and things. It would be, in short, the proper name of God; it would be the very name of indifference.1 The “shared past” to which Borges refers and upon which language depends is not, however, a shared past experience, but, rather, it is the shared a priori convention of language. There is no community without this convention. This shared convention instances the possibility of language qua instrument of communication, but does so at the cost 173 Idiocy, the Name of God of the articulation of anyone’s singular experience. It is precisely the singularity of experience that cannot be said, expressed, and thus communicated , shared. Or rather the conventionality of language...