Borges Criticism – Scientific
- At August 29, 2019
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
- 0
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise.”
Borges Criticism: Scientific Criticism
This page collects English-language Borges criticism within the disciplines of science, mathematics, and technology. This includes artificial intelligence, “posthuman” studies, and so on. Works of general criticism such as surveys, conference notes, and indexes may be found under General Criticism. The Borges Criticism main page features a “Quick Reference Card” with more details.
Most of the books profiled in this section are accompanied by a brief description, a summary of contents, and the official publisher’s blurb. Original commentary is included only for those books I’ve read, although I’ve included a few reviews excerpted from other sources. If any visitor would like to contribute informed commentary for any of these works, please contact the Garden! The books are listed in chronological order of publication. Clicking the image of a book takes you directly to Amazon.com.
Borges and Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis in the Style of Pierre Menard
Borges and Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis in the Style of Pierre Menard
By Ema Lapidot.
Peter Lang, 1991.
Ema Lapidot is an Assistant Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Russell Sage College, in Troy, New York. Her specialty is the relationship of literature to artificial intelligence and cybernetics.
According to Peter Lang:
This book analyzes the tight weave between literature and science found in Borges’ writings. Of the many aspects of scientific thought found in Borges’ work, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one even though the author was not aware of the existence of this technology. Borges discusses explicitly the mechanization of thoughts in some of his essays. Drawing on Borges’ idea that it is the reader, and not the writer, who sets the meaning on a text, a contemporary reader finds that many concepts of AI technology are implicit in his short stories, ideas such as «hardware», «software», «memory», «program» and «programmer», «data», and so on. His essential skepticism echoes the skeptics of present-day AI scientists.
Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics
Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics
By Floyd Merrell.
Purdue University Press, 1991.
A prolific scholar of Latin American literature with a background in chemistry and physics, Floyd Merrell was a professor at Purdue University. Many of Merrell’s works on Borges revolve around science and mathematics, and his papers often bear wonderfully intriguing titles such as “Borges and Early Quantum Labyrinths” or “Borges and the Fourth Dimension.”
From Purdue University Press:
This authoritative study explores the scientific and mathematical cultural milieu that patterns much of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s narrative design. Although criticism of Borges’s fiction and essays has long emphasized philosophical traditions, Merrell expands the context of this interrogation of traditions by revealing how early twentieth-century and contemporary mathematics and physics also participated in a similar exploration. Topics treated include the semiotic flows of paradox and contradiction, the patterns of infinities, the limits of natural and mathematical languages, and the narrative function in scientific theory. Against this, background, Merrell provides incisive readings of Borges’s complex fiction and essays.
Silvia G. Dapía wrote a lengthy review of Unthinking Thinking for Variaciones Borges, declaring it “a fascinating book, recommendable for its goals, scope, and knowledge of secondary material.”
Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges
Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter.
Bucknell University Press, 2009.
This unique book is edited by Ivan Callus, author of several noted works on poststructuralism, deconstruction, contemporary fiction, and posthumanism; and Stefan Herbrechter, a co-director of the Critical Posthumanism Network. The Garden of Forking Paths has a full description and review of Cy-Borges available on the “Borges Reviews” section. A good idea of what the reader may expect can be gleaned from the jacket blurb, written by postcolonial critic Iain Chambers:
When the poetical mutates into the prosthetical the curvature of an unsuspected time can transport us into the archives of the future. In the memory of what is yet to come, the unsettling encounter of the writing of Jorge Luis Borges and the posthumanist immanence of the cyborg revisits and redirects the very language of criticism and philosophy. What allows the ‘human’ to appear and refract a sovereign subjectivity is here justly rendered a ruin. In writing up and recodifying ‘reason’ after ‘man’ and meta-physics, both Borges and the cyborg not only challenge the predicated banality of ‘ordinary’ life, but, push it out of joint, undo its telos, and make it homeless. A future that recalls an ambivalent past, a series of forking paths, the circular itineraries of language, returns to interrupt the present. Forever taking leave, thinking at the edge of time, this fascinating collection of essays allows us to begin to engage with the impossibilities that make us what we ‘are.’
If you are not the type of reader to trust a blurb that requires your spellchecker to learn several neologisms and places quotations around the word “are,” perhaps the publisher’s description will make more sense:
Cy-Borges—this compound word seems almost destined. It allows the associations of cyber—and cyborg to converge around the name of Jorge Luis Borges, many of whose writings are strangely prescient thought-experiments in the impossible and the unconfigurable. For though Borges speaks scantily of technology and hardly at all of the cyber-cultural futures that make it possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings contrive glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more typically associated with writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. Yet the posthuman, as that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once technology re-engineers human potential and institutes a new physics, is everywhere in Borges. As this collection shows through a series of close readings of his work, Borges is therefore the precursor whom posthumanism would have had to invent had he not existed.
Cy-Borges contains ten essays and an introduction by the editors. The contents are as follows:
- Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, “Introduction: Did Someone Say ‘Cy-Borges’?”
- Floyd Merrell, “Borges: Post- or Transhuman?”
- Neil Badmington, “Babelation”
- David Ciccoricco, “Borges, Technology, and the Same Infinite Substance as the Night”
- Gordon Calleja, “Of Mirrors, Encyclopedias, and the Virtual”
- Ruben Borg, “Surviving in Borges, or, the Memory of Objects after the End of the World”
- Jonathan Boulter, “Borges and the Trauma of Posthuman History.”
- Martin S. Watson, “Archival Imaginings”
- Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Borges Canny Laughter: ‘a joyce for ever’”
- Paula Rabinowitz, “The Abysmal Problem of Time: Dubbing Borges’s Garden”
- Ivan Callus, “The Unrelated Future: Borges, Posthumanism, and the Temptations of Analogy.”
For those who would like to know more, the Garden has a full review of Cy-Borges available on the “Reviews” section.
Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain
Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain
By Rodrigo Quian Quiroga.
Translation by Juan Pablo Fernández.
Foreword by María Kodama.
MIT Press, 2012.
Born in Argentina, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga is Director of the Bioengineering Research Centre at the University of Leicester.
Description from MIT Press:
A scientist’s exploration of the working of memory begins with a story by Borges about a man who could not forget.
Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga’s discoveries decades before he made them.
The title character of Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges’s widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband’s personal library, and Borges’s books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga’s discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like “Funes.”
With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate.
Borges Criticism
Main Page — Return to the Borges Criticism main page and index.
Biography — Borges biography and memoir.
General Criticism 1 — General literary criticism and commentary written during Borges’ life, 1965–1986.
General Criticism 2 — General literary criticism and commentary written from 1987 to the present.
Comparative Criticism — Borges criticism with a strong political, cultural, or linguistic component, including postcolonial criticism, genre studies, and author comparisons.
Religious & Esoteric Criticism — Borges criticism from a religious, metaphysical, or philosophical perspective.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 10 January 2020
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com