Borges and the concept of the political

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges can y and should be read not as a political writer but as a writer of the politic (just like sometimes a conceptual artist is not a political artist but an artist of the political) "”that is, the article proposes reading Borges neither as a writer nor an artist who intervenes in the visible conflicts of his time (although Borges did at times intervene politically, mostly with uninteresting and even deeply unpleasant results) nor a writer or an artist that describes the political process of his time and other times (although Borges also did this, with suggestive and playful results), but as a writer or an artist who questions the enigma of the institution of society"”an enigma that is central to political philosophy, as it deals with the invisible of the visible, with the meaning of that which appears, disappears or re-appears, and which is invisible or revealed as visible in collective life. This political analysis of Borges is made in a dialogue with theories around the concept of the politic developed by Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort.