Borges y Yo

“We follow the signs. Language speaks us. But in the process, we become split between a conscious self and an unconscious self that we repress, deny, and repeat” (1160).

“The discovery of what it articulates in that place, that is to say, in the unconscious, enables us to grasp at the price of what splitting it has thus been constituted” (1185).

These two passages, the first one from the intro, and the second from “The Signification of the Phallus,” both show the price of language, which is the splitting of our identity between a conscious and an unconscious. Here is a short story by Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges, aiming to express a similar kind of duplication or self-estrangement:

To the other one, to Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and I delay myself, perhaps almost mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; from Borges I find out through the mail and I see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belong to no-one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, although I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being: the stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books that in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

When I was reading Lacan, I was made to think of this short story. I wondered how Lacan would analyze the story. In the Norton introduction it explains Lacan’s ideas about self-estrangement. There is no doubt that Borges’ narrator is experiencing both self-estrangement and copulation. Rather than taking Decartes’ statement, “I think therefore I am,” as it was, he created his own version of it: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (1160). It is when a person sees himself in the mirror, that he understands himself as a whole person, and undergoes the misrecognition of his fragmented state. The image he sees in the mirror gives him a sense of self that is false. The image is not really him. This goes with the Lacanian cogito. The image in the mirror is where he thinks, but he is not where he thinks; therefore he is not the image in the mirror (or in his writing, or his name, or his preferences). For this reason, the self, when articulated in language, becomes Symbolic. Thus, even things that are true about the unconscious that come through, such as preferences for “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography (etc.)” are shared by the ego “in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.” Borges translates himself onto the page as part of the poetic impulse, but as he does so, he creates a new self that he is not.

The last line of the piece is particularly important. In class today, we discussed how the unconscious comes through in art. Borges’ story expresses doubt about that fact. He says, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”