Chaos and Cosmos: The Imaginary and the Political in Jorge Luis Borges(Social Imaginaries)

Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and that of the relationship between the same and the other. Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist. The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges’ essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction I – Contextualizing Borges Chapter 1: Tlön as Political Form Chapter 2: The Aleph and the Argentine Cultural Tradition Chapter 3: History, the Mother of Truth II – Interrogating the Political Chapter 4: Chaos and Cosmos Chapter 5: Dreams and Nightmares Chapter 6: The Same and the Other Bibliography Index About the Author

About the Author :
Martín Plot is research professor of political theory at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina) and the Interdisciplinary School of Advanced Social Studies (EIDAES/UNSAM, Argentina). He is also research fellow in political thought at the CalArts’ Aesthetics and Politics Program.

Review :
This challenging work will be of mutual benefit to both specialist political theorists and advanced Borgesian scholars. In a remarkable exercise, Martín Plot reads Borges in the light of some of the fundamental questions of 20th century political theory, without detracting either from Borges' prose or from the finest understanding of contemporary political theory. Throughout the postwar period, political thinkers in the Anglophone West have considered aesthetic works and ideas as either apolitical or anti-political. Much has been done in recent years to rectify this misapprehension. Few international scholars have contributed more to the radical rethinking of aesthetics and politics than Martín Plot, who in this volume, shows us how we can approach the writings of a master of twentieth century literature as an astute and engaged political thinker, through both the stories he wrote and the forms of writing he developed. Every reader of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories and essays will be aware of the variety of philosophical themes and puzzles they contain. Martín Plot’s achievement in Chaos and Cosmos is to show that underlying these fragments is a systematic philosophical position, a form of pragmatism that rejects epistemological, metaphysical, and political absolutes. Plot's argument is based on a well-informed and wonderfully insightful reading of a range of Borges’ texts.