Zahir

Zahir

Zahir

Introduction

Borges approaches the relation between metaphor and likeness in "El Zahir" by engaging with the age-old philosophical distinction between reality and appearance. Let us be clear: Borges does not use publications as a vehicle for philosophizing; rather than, he scrounges material from the philosophical custom in alignment to develop literary form. Although Borges is not a philosopher, this does not signify that the fabulist and essayist has not anything to state to beliefs, or that these borrowings do not contemplate certain thing back to the domain from which they were taken.

Discussion

This work can be considered as the least successful one as the Aleph comprises the aesthetic production of simultaneity as a issue of universal visibility, an perfect locus from which things occupying distinct positions in space become manifest together. With the Zahir, on the other hand, the unconditional is the simultaneous production of what we usually see as resisting edges or faces. Whereas the Aleph counteracts the expanse between points in space, the Zahir counteracts time: time rendered tropologically-that is, spatially-as the insight of resisting edges of a coin. This account of the Zahir proposes a representation of unconditional information as characterised by speculative philosophy: the likeness of the Zahir is that of brain conceiving simultaneously the resisting instants or "faces" of the dialectic. The Zahir, in this reading, comprises the basic fantasy of the dialectical tradition. It is the reconciliation of thesis and antithesis, the negation of negation, and the shrewd production of the Idea. It should not arrive as a shock, although, that the imminent triumph of metaphysical cause over its other ones would furthermore be the end of all cause, its plunge into the infantilizing space of undifferentiated sameness(Van Hee 2000).

Third motif: The addition of the infamous "louis" in the narrator's recount of the coin points to an significant, albeit rather ambiguous attachment between aesthetic metaphor, publications and the inquiry of sovereignty.9 While the inquiry of sovereignty is only implicit in "El Zahir," my outlook is that Borges considers that dialect itself is the factual sovereign. If "El Zahir" can be read as an expanded metaphor of metaphor itself, as well as the dream of a world that has been solely subsumed inside a certain reasoning of equivalence, it is furthermore an try to believe the limit of exchange and to aroused from the nightmare of a world that has dropped solely under the shaded of the One. "In alignment to misplace themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own titles, or the ninety-nine divine titles, until they become meaningless. I long to journey that path. Perhaps I will resolve by wearing away [gastar] the Zahir easily through conceiving it afresh and again" (Maudemarie 1998 844-61).

Borges's article concludes with this considered of calm resolve in the face of imminent decrease of world. The idea that repetition could someway disintegrate the unconditional tyranny of the One is highlighted by the Spanish verb gastar, which can signify both "to wear away" and "to ...