The deadly immediacy: Jorge Luis Borges and the longing for absolute knowledge

Abstract

Philosophy finds in Borges’ literature a unique place to reflect on its own problems. In this essay, I shall examine the tensions and contradictions that arise from a metaphysical paradigm of immediacy and intuition. Reading the story «Funes, el memorioso», I will show that a system of signs and a perceptive faculty that ignores the necessary difference between the real and the representation is impossible for men. Human life is unhuman if it is affirmed in its ideal of an absolute knowledge, of an uninterrupted vision. Man live in between mediations and interruptions; human beings remember because they forget, awakens because they sleep, know because they ignore, look because their eyes have also eyelashes.