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1 Time: For Borges In the Prologue to the Obras completas version of El otro, el mismo (The Other, the Same), Borges ascribed his preference for this collection of verse to the fact that it encompassed all of his literary obsessions: “There, likewise, are my habits: Buenos Aires, the cult of the elders, Germanic studies [la germanística], the contradiction of time that passes and the identity that endures, my stupor at the fact that time, our substance, can be shared” (1996, 2.235). The items in this list might be generalized in the following terms: space (Buenos Aires), the archive of cultural secrets (“the cult of the elders”), philosophy (Germanic studies), time, identity, and the possibility of community. That these are Borges’s principal concerns is undeniable, but he does not accord each of these obsessions equal importance. Borges underscores the importance of the problem of time and identity by repeatedly insisting that time is the fundamental problem of metaphysics. At the University of Belgrade in 1978, in a lecture entitled “Time [El tiempo],” he concluded: “time is an essential problem. I mean that we cannot do without time. Our consciousness is continually passing from one state to another, and that is time: succession” (4.199). Moreover, he suggests that were we to have only one sense, that of hearing, for example, and were we to imagine our perception of the world on the basis of this sense alone, although we would be unable to perceive space, “[i]n that world, nevertheless, we would always have time. Because time is succession” (4.198). The privileging of time over space means that the “congenital idealism ” of the inhabitants of Tlön is our idealism: “For the people of Tlön, 25 26 Kant’s Dog the world is not an amalgam of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts—the world is successive, temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the conjectural Ursprache of Tlön [El mundo para ellos no es un concurso de objetos en el espacio; es una serie heterogénea de actos independientes. Es sucesiva, temporal, no espacial. No hay sustantivos en la conjectural Ursprache de Tlön]” (1.435/CF 72–73). Temporal succession makes the self-identity of the substantive—that is, substance—possible. However ironically presented, the critique of the doctrine of materialism, which depends on identity over time and thus on spatiality, spells out the consequences of idealism’s necessary privileging of temporal succession over spatial perdurance (1.435/CF 75). In “A New Refutation of Time,” however, without attempting to establish the priority of space, Borges nonetheless challenges both Berkeley’s and Hume’s assertion that according to their respective temporal logics, neither could support the thought of identity. The distinction between space and time can be read in an anecdote Borges related to Carlos Peralta: “an Argentine philosopher and I were talking about time, and the philosopher said: ‘We have made a lot of progress in that in the last years.’ And I thought that if I had asked him about space surely he would have answered: ‘We have made a lot of progress in that in the last blocks’ ” (Irby 108, my translation).1 In both cases the philosopher measures progress according to the particular intuition of sense under discussion, as if the measurement of space and time were absolutely discrete, as if it were possible to progress over the last few years without a spacing of time; or, alternatively, as if it were possible to progress through the last few blocks without a temporalization of space. Although the joke is on the philosopher, Borges in fact does not object to the logic that conceives space and time as distinct from one another. A few years earlier, during a “conversation” at New York University, he observed, “I tend to be always thinking of time, not of space. When I hear the words ‘time’ and ‘space’ used together, I feel as Nietzsche felt when he heard people talking about Goethe and Schiller—a kind of blasphemy. I think that the central riddle, the central problem of metaphysics—let us call it thinking—is time, not space. Space is one of the many things to be found inside of time—as you find, for example, color or shapes or sizes or feelings” (Christ 400–1). In the same vein, in the lecture on time Borges argues that it is possible “to [18.223.0.53...

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