Reading Circle - Ficciones, March 2008

[Bruno]

@Bas

And from this you can deduce what is slightly ironic in Tlön (but perhaps it had been said in some post above). When Borges says something like: “On Tlön, all the sciences were subdued to psychology” or “On Tlön, philosophy was considered as fantastic litterature”, you can suppress “on tlön” and you get the basement of Borges’ thought.

Which leads us to a very important question: have we been reading fantastic literature, or have we been reading philosophy? How are the logical grounds of science or the solid pilars of democracy any more valid than the fictions of Borges?

@Bas

This is not so different by the way from what Nietzsche said once about philosophy, that is, philosophers first create a morale in order to justify their own behavior, then they create a philosophy in order to justify their morale, then they present the whole in the reverse order.

That’s more like something Foucault would say. Although I agree with you that Borges himself draws a lot from Nietzsche. The whole subverting human knowledge into psychology is very cool. And very hard to escape, also.

@Bas

And that’s the reason why the end of the Tlön may look like, if not real, say possible. It just asserts that humankind is crazy (what is suggested by the reference to WWII events), that any form of craziness may be good enough for it, and that what looks crazy today will be the reason of tomorrow.

Unfortunately, people still don’t know what to do with that. They keep saying “post modernists have dissolved the subject” and that we’re living a “crisis of sense” — not to mention Lyotard’s (“who rhymes with…”, sorry, couldn’t resist ) name for it — but the truth is, humankind has come to a great joint realisation, namely that there are no solid grounds in the realm of knowledge, and they still don’t know what to do with it. Until people get the gist of Tlön, Uqbar, we’re cursed into living, ourselves, into real life-size instances of Tlön.

(For those interested, a list of other pretty cool stories by Borges in that sense: “On Rigor in Science”, “The Lottery in Babylon”, “The Zahir”, “The Library of Babel”, “The Book of Sand”, “Blue Tigers” (one of the most brilliant stories of all time), “The Aleph”… and my recently personal favourite: “Three Versions of Judas”).