Review – Cy-Borges

Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

Edited by Stefan Herbrechter & Ivan Callus
Bucknell University Press, 2009

Borges’s stories often have this effect on their readers: one laughs at their absurdity, then quickly glances around to be sure they have not occurred. This sense of chronological dislocation is the mark of posthuman experience in two senses. First, because it is a feeling that goes beyond the linear, unified sense of self that is traditionally associated with the humanist self-conception; and second, because it is a contemporary feeling that has much to do with the exponentially accelerating technoscientific advances that surround us. It is the feeling of the presence of the future, the feeling that what is to come might already have arrived.
—Martin S. Watson, “Archival Imaginings”

A collection of papers and essays centered around the “punceptual possibilities” of the title itself, Cy-Borges is edited by Stefan Herbrechter, co-director of the Critical Posthumanism Network; and Ivan Callus, author of several noted works on poststructuralism, deconstruction, and contemporary fiction. A unique and often fascinating volume, Cy-Borges positions Borges as a precursor to “posthumanism,” a postmodern approach to the humanities that decenters autonomy and free will, and examines human beings as limited organisms enmeshed in networks of interlocking forces such as history, culture, technology, and biology. A field of study with sometimes nebulously defined parameters, posthumanism is related to “transhumanism,” the speculative philosophy of how human consciousness might evolve beyond its biological parameters. Needless to say, technology plays a critical role in these philosophies, particularly artificial intelligence, information technology, and virtual reality. Posthumanism and transhumanism are also informed by, and feed into, literary genres such as science fiction, postmodernism, and sometimes horror.

A large tent indeed; and Cy-Borges makes no attempt to tie its authors to any particular stake. This catholic approach is both a strength and weakness. On one hand, its authors express a diversity of opinions on many subjects, and Cy-Borges never suffers from the sense of monotony that dogs some academic collections. On the other hand, there is a general catch-all feeling to Cy-Borges. A good essay collection is like a jigsaw puzzle, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Each piece has its own contours, but when viewed in context, a coherent picture emerges. Cy-Borges never quite attains that unity. Some of its essays feel like pieces from a different puzzle, hastily re-cut to fit the framework of posthumanism.

There is also the question of intended audience. Cy-Borges is unquestionably a collection of academic papers, with all the tortuous prose and impenetrable jargon that entails. However, its marketing materials target a “hip” science fiction crowd along with the accustomed academics, and William Gibson, Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner, and The Matrix are prominently name-checked on the jacket flap. These are powerful cultural talismans, designed to attract a more secular readership despite the book’s steep institutional pricing. But once the covers are opened, there’s decidedly less sexy talk about cyberspace, red pills, and morally ambiguous cyborgs than Derridean deconstructions of the dislocated “we” and the reconstruction of the “Da-sein.”

With that combination of caveat lector/emptor in mind, let’s take a closer look at the contents.

Cy-Borges begins with a cheerful introduction by its editors. Explaining the genesis of the “punceptual” title, they outline the goals of the book, quoting extensively from foundational posthumanist philosophers Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Little background is offered on these thinkers, an early indication that a casual reader might benefit from some preparatory homework. Still, the editors do a good job in framing their project, and offer their own thoughts on a few of the essays and contributors ahead.

The first formal paper is “Borges: Post- or Transhuman?” by Floyd Merrell, the author of Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics and the New Physics. Although Merrell’s background in mathematics makes him an ideal contributor to Cy-Borges, this piece is not his strongest work, and seems an ill-considered selection to inaugurate the collection. A study of four Borges stories, Merrell’s connections to posthumanism feel forced, and he never satisfactorily answers the question posed by his ambitious title. Moreover, Merrell can’t resist the unfortunate academic compulsion to overanalyze a subject to the point of ridiculousness, and his heavy-handed application of “Einsteinian space-time continuum” to “Death and the Compass” approaches the level of parody. To the average reader, Scharlach lured Lönnrot into a trap; to Merrell, the villain won a complex game of four-dimensional chess by mastering a timeless ‘B-series’ consisting of ‘Before’ and ‘After’ in contrast to the linearly ordered ‘A-series’ evincing movement from ‘Past’ to ‘Present’ to ‘Future.’ Right; or, he lured him into a trap. Fortunately, Merrell stands on firmer ground during his analysis of “Averroës’ Search,” and his comments about Borges’ recursive construction of a fictional Averroës rank among the finest insights Cy-Borges has to offer.

Neil Badmington’s “Babelation” is next, an exploration of Borges’ “impossible” libraries and texts, which Badmington claims are deliberately designed to “mess with your mind.” Badmington points out that “Foucault famously laughed when he read Borges,” and his own essay takes delight in Borges’ paradoxes, concluding with a neologism of his own to rival “Cy-Borges.” Again, the connection to posthumanism is tenuous, depending on the simple notion that the human brain cannot handle infinity. “The Library of Babel” is also the subject of the next paper, David Ciccoricco’s “Borges, Technology, and the Same Infinite Substance as the Night.” More tightly focused on posthumanism than the previous two writers, Ciccoricco examines Borges’ fascination with endless regress as an example of the technological sublime, comparing a human reader’s aesthetic response to infinity to a more practical technological understanding of recursivity.

Technology is at the heart of Gordon Calleja’s “Of Mirrors, Encyclopedias, and the Virtual,” one of my favorite contributions in the collection. Calleja offers a compelling argument that our current world of virtual reality and Massive Multiplayer Online Games bears a resemblance to the encroaching fictional reality of Borges’ Tlön. Written in a direct, readable style with genuine sympathy for the online community, Calleja’s paper is lucid and enjoyable, and makes a persuasive case that, like Borges’ world, our online worlds are extensions of our reality, and not oppositional or escapist non-realities as usually supposed. Given the nature of his topic, some of Calleja’s examples are inevitably dated, but his thesis remains relevant. Perhaps even more so, as virtual reality has become more competitive in the markets for gaming, education, and—naturally—pornography.

If Calleja’s paper is the most intelligible in the collection, it is followed by the most inscrutable: “Surviving in Borges, or, the Memory of Objects at the End of the World,” written by the felicitously-named Ruben Borg. A glance at the contributor biographies reveals that Borg is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze, and Derrida, which is a good indication of what to expect. The essay is a Derridean deconstruction of Borges’ concept of authorial identity as understood in relation to the “incommunicable” nature of death. Following in the footsteps of his French muse, Borg’s writing is poetic yet maddeningly opaque, and boasts eye-rolling sentences such as “This scene deserves the entire focus of our critical energies,” and “Let us agree—let us dare to be of one mind on the subject—that by choosing the secret as its theme ‘Elogio de la sombra’ realizes an elaborate allegory of Macedonio’s philosophical method.” Such pretentions are so blatant one begins to wonder if Borg isn’t putting the reader on, perhaps just a bit; and there are some paragraphs that elude clarity even after several re-readings. This becomes even more apparent when the author quotes Borges directly; Borg’s convoluted analysis does not compare favorably with the powerful immediacy of Borges’ verse. Compare “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges” with “Against all identifications, then, the identification of death and the mirror predates the narcissistic image; and while it inaugurates the history of the self-same it also provides it with its definitive horizon.” In the end, Borg seems to be saying that no one can communicate the “secret” of death; that awareness of personal oblivion necessarily haunts a poet’s words—which I could have discovered by talking to the nearest goth.

Next is Jonathan Boulter’s “Borges and the Trauma of Posthuman History,” a Freudian analysis of Borges’ characters as incarnations of “trauma.” Starting with “Funes the Memorius,” Boulter suggests that the character’s astonishing memory is a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder, a unique form of “hysterical paralysis.” His argument that “Funes the Memorius” is a parody of Freud might be over-reaching, but Boulter makes some sharp observations about the story, and his connections to real-world cases of PTSD are intriguing. Even more interesting are Boulter’s comments about “Deutsches Requiem” and “The Writing of the God.” Boulter contends that both narratives elide their true subject, the unspeakable cultural trauma of genocide. More than any other writer in Cy-Borges, Boulter is not afraid to critique Borges himself, and he takes issue with Borges’ unwillingness to engage directly with these atrocities, undermining their trauma with vague “revelations” about “secret histories.” In both these stories, the renunciation of the self and the annihilation of one’s identity results in the sublime indifference of a cosmic perspective; Boulter interrogates this philosophical trope from a decidedly moral standpoint. While one might argue that Boulter is placing too much weight upon what amounts to a clever plot device, his criticism of Borges’ metaphysical fatalism—and by extension, the tenets of posthumanism itself—is refreshing, and Boulter’s essay is the most “human” of these posthuman meditations.

This is followed by another political offering, Martin S. Watson’s “Archival Imaginings,” an examination of Borges’ obsession with libraries and encyclopedias anchored in the work of Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari. Surprisingly transparent for a paper guided by poststructuralist philosophy, Watson’s essay describes the manner in which power is concentrated and exercised by the entities that organize and archive information, whether in Borges’ fictional “Library of Babel” or the virtual stacks of a post-capitalist Internet. The various sects, heresies, and mythologies of Borges’ infinite library are examined, each revealed as a necessary product of the library’s essential nature. Watson’s discussion of “Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine” is particularly provocative, calling attention to the mechanized aspects of traditional aesthetics: “Borges’s comparison dissolves the walls between the human and the machine, showing the prized ‘spontaneity’ of poetics to be merely a feature of arbitrary or recombinatory thought.” Watson goes on to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizomatic” thinking, suggesting that randomized poetics such as Burroughsian “cut-ups” and possibly even the medium of email have a potentially disruptive influence on power. He concludes by examining the “supplanting archive,” framing “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as a cautionary tale about the oppressive—and attractive—power of a monolithic system. Necessarily informed by Watson’s post-Marxist politics, “Archival Imaginings” is one of the most thoughtful and compelling papers in the collection, and one that offers a genuine interrogation of posthumanist principles.

A statement that cannot be said about the otherwise delightful Jean-Michel Rabaté’s “Borges’s Canny Laughter: a joyce forever,” which seems to have found its way into Cy-Borges from a different collection. A discussion of Borges’ evolving opinions about James Joyce, Rabaté begins by calling attention to a little known fact. One of Borges’ last pieces of published writing was an introduction to a French-language compilations of his works, Ouvres Complètes, in which Borges blatantly misattributes a famous line of verse: “A thing of beauty is a joyce forever, John Keats wrote memorably.” Rabaté unpacks the history behind this knowing pun, examining Borges’ relationship to literary modernism with precision and clarity; not an easy thing to do when discussing Finnegans Wake, T.S. Eliot, and the inevitable Derrida! While the essay is short on posthumanism, Rabaté’s comparisons of Borges and George Bataille are worth the price of admission alone.

Posthumanism makes a return in Paula Rabinowitz’ “The Abysmal Problem of Time: Dubbing Borges’s Garden.” After addressing the central “puncept” of the book’s title, Rabinowitz indulges in a series of riffs on “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the problems with dubbing, Rita Heyward’s Gilda, and the impossibility of artistic originality. More a freewheeling conversation than a coherent argument, the essay is propelled by playful associations and kept afloat by Rabinowitz’ buoyant writing. The question of style over substance is tacitly acknowledged by the author herself, who poses the refreshingly honest question: “And hence I must come to ask: What can I say that has not already been said by Borges and his followers?” Her answer confirms the difficulty of categorizing Borges’ work, tenuously linking it to the book’s central conceit: “Borges was his own genre—no matter in what form he chose to write. It is the inevitability of this repetition, this impossibility of originality that must be the final point of the adventure, at the threshold of the human, which plays with the impossibility of originality and the irrepressibility of replication. In seeing this, Borges was undoubtedly a posthumanist.”

Rabinowitz’s concluding statement makes a fine introduction to the final essay, “The Unrelated Future: Borges, Posthumanism, and the Temptations of Analogy.” Written by the book’s co-editor Ivan Callus, this piece expands his introduction, and examines how the fields of posthumanism and literary criticism might benefit from a closer relationship. Although it follows gracefully from the preceding essay, it seems curiously misplaced, and might have served better at the beginning of the collection. More than any other essay in Cy-Borges, “The Unrelated Future” specifically enumerates the tenets of posthumanism, underscores the connections the discipline has to Borges’ work, and articulates the purpose of the book: “In considering that we ought to recall that the rationale of this volume hinges on the idea that Borges’s texts provide a (pre)figuration of posthumanism. In that case, they could be said to allegorize it…If this volume has any worth it is because it will have established that there is a distinct specificity in the relationship between Borges and posthumanism, and one that ought to be recognized and valued for its singularity…” Callus also expresses a robust awareness of the doubts, inconsistencies, and ironies of the project, anticipating some of the critiques I’ve made in this review. While his style comes across as a touch self-satisfied—Callus is fond of deploying gratuitous parentheses and etymological breakdowns to highlight multivalent meanings—he makes a persuasive argument for the timeliness of the collection at hand.

So, again; who is the audience for Cy-Borges? It remains a tough call. Those attracted to Cy-Borges for the science fiction elements trumpeted by the marketing materials may be surprised to find considerably more Derrida than Dick. However, to follow Callus’ own thinking, “literary” readers may find the themes of posthumanism somewhat obscure, while “posthumanist” readers may be disappointed that more essays don’t grapple directly with its philosophical precepts. Nevertheless, this esoteric theme is what distinguishes Cy-Borges from the crowded field of Borges criticism dedicated to poetics, metaphysics, and literary theory; but also what invites the sharpest criticism. Because posthumanism often speculates about a distant and potentially unimaginable future, its devotees study the past and present for signs, traces, and metaphors about the “posthuman.” Such philosophical concerns can make compelling reading, especially when they intersect with contemporary questions about information architecture, social media, and the changing nature of privacy and surveillance. However, when posthumanism and transhumanism become too abstract, the resulting discussions feel cloistered and remote, and questions such as Callus’ “Would a cyborg read Borges?” feel more silly than profound.

In the end, Cy-Borges remains an academic book. While it never transcends the limits of that genre—why some academics perversely obscure the very things they should be clarifying remains a mystery to me!—its subject matter warrants a more interesting approach. To paraphrase my own favorite cyborg, while “I had in mind something a little more radical,” Cy-Borges is “nothing the God of bio-mechanics wouldn’t let you in heaven for.”

Additional Information

Cy-Borges
You may purchase Cy-Borges from Amazon.com.

Critical Posthumanism Network
Edited by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter, this site is a great resource for posthuman studies, and features contributions by some of the writers in Cy-Borges, including Neil Badmington, Ruben Borg, and Jean-Michel Rabaté.

Author: Allen B. Ruch
First Posted: 10 January 2020
Last Modified: 23 August 2024
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Borges Reviews Page: Borges Reviews
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