Borges in French Theory

Abstract Starting in the early 1960s, Jorge Luis Borges quickly became a celebrity among French thinkers. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; historians such as Michel Foucault; semiologists such as Julia Kristeva; or sociologists such as Jean Baudrillard all had recourse at one point or another to ideas and formulations from the Argentine writer. In addition to the appeal of Borges’s unique style of writing and thinking, two lines of affinity brought about this unexpected confluence of interests: the shared critique of the subjectivity of “man,” or of the human at the center of the discourse of the human sciences, and the critique of language as “mimesis,” or as the imitation or representation of the real. However, what soon thereafter in the Anglophone world would come to be known as “French theory,” by giving entrance to Borges in some of its most significant early texts, may well have been welcoming into its midst the uncanny force of a Trojan horse. Indeed, the Argentine’s own theoretical and philosophical commitments always tended to favor a tradition that for the longest time was anathema to the whole Parisian philosophical scene, namely, the tradition of New England pragmatism. However, the point of contrasting the two is not to signal a supposed misreading so much as to see what we can learn from this about some of Borges’s most famous readers in France.