Friend, Enemy, and Everything in Between: Re-thinking alterity with and against Borges and Schmitt (respectively)

• In Event: Arte, Política y Subjetividades

Abstract

Borges is for very good reasons regarded as a fundamentally philosophical writer. Those reasons, however, are not based on the assumption that to practice philosophy is to offer solutions to questions regarding the human condition or some other metaphysical perplexity. Neither in his poems and short stories nor in his non-fiction essays Borges offers solutions or morals to the problems of aesthetic form, political coexistence, or epistemological inquiry. What Borges offers are interrogations. "El otro, el mismo" is a book of poems Borges published in 1964. The title condenses with precision one of the central themes of Borges the writer-thinker, and it is in the very preface to the text that he portraits his inquiry as one that “without predetermined laws, works in a hesitant and bold way, as if walking in the darkness.” One of the terrains in which Borges’ writing advanced both hesitantly and boldly was regarding the question of the Other, a central interrogation in political and social theory since the controversial German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt’s defined the political as the most extreme type of human antagonism. For Schmitt, the Other is simply the one whose existence is no longer compatible with ours, the one who has simply become the enemy. In this paper, Borges’ fiction and non-fiction writings will be presented as a critical contribution to our ability to problematize and ultimately oppose Schmitt’s position.

Author

• Martin F Plot, IDAES-UNSAM/CONICET (Argentina)