The Aleph as Pandemonium: Borgesian Reflections in a Tired World

Abstract

In this article, I combine an interpretation of Jorge Luis Borges’ fiction and non-fiction writing with experimental filmmaking – the latter in explicit dialogue with Borges and the theme of pandemonium – in order to suggest an implicit dialectic between our contemporary cosmos and the imminence of new cosmoses-to-come. First, I use an unconventional source – Japanese filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio – to offer a working definition of the notion of ‘pandemonium’. In the rest of the paper, I move to a second unconventional source and introduce Borges – both in his own work and in film adaptation – as a thinker of the political, someone who could help us inquire into the imminence of possible pandemonium(s). Thinking with Borges helps us approach our current condition for two reasons. On the one hand, because we should emulate Borges in the need to theorize the imminent when new figures of the political delineate themselves in the historical horizon. This is the focus of the first section of the paper, in which Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘vision of je ne sais quoi’ is extended to Borges’ interrogation of the emerging political form of totalitarianism in his own time. On the other hand, because thinking with Borges helps us see how this inquiry suggests that it could be nightmares instead of dreams that are awaiting us. In the company of filmmakers Matsumoto, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and of philosophers Claude Lefort, Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, Borges will become our fellow traveller in the task of sensing the imminence of a pandemonium as the potential outcome of our contemporary political condition.