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A fresh look at how Borges's most celebrated stories critique various forms of sovereignty, from philosophical ideals of mastery to historical instances of fascism.
Jorge Luis Borges was one of the principal writers of the twentieth century to bring literature to bear on the relationship between the political and the philosophical. Although often regarded as a master of the abstract and universal, his fiction is equally concerned with the singular—with the unique, odd, and contingent. Kate Jenckes revisits Borges's most well-known stories with fresh eyes, revealing their persistent preoccupation with singularity, understood at base as that which exceeds sovereignty. Borges Between Singularity and Sovereignty explores Borges’s portrayal of the limits of sovereignty in a range of registers, from stylized depictions of imperialism and fascism to the structure of subjectivity with its dependence on perception, memory, and language. Through the cracks in different ideals of sovereignty emerges a mode of relation that Borges reluctantly calls the aesthetic, which serves to name a non-sovereign approach to the singularities of life and historicity.
"Borges Between Singularity and Sovereignty shows the necessity of moving between these two poles—the first representing the possibility of ethical relation and the second representing the dominant political idea of the West, the attainment of mastery over oneself, one's community, and one's world. Jenckes is a sensitive reader, newly illuminating the very works that made Borges an important point of reference in the fields of world literature and philosophy and demonstrating their relevance to current debates about politics, identity, and the nature of knowledge." — Stephen Gingerich, author of This Side of Philosophy: Literature and Thinking in Twentieth-Century Spanish Letters