CUNY Academic Commons

Continuing the theme of Borges and pragmatism vs. Borges and post-structuralism, I searched Borges and William James on the “Criticism” section of The University of Pittsburg’s “Borges Center.” The site is an open source for Borges scholarship with a large collection of critical articles on Borges in both Spanish and English. The editor is the renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston. The results of my search yielded this article on Borges and pragmatism by Bruno Bosteels, entitled “The Truth is in the Making: Borges and Pragmatism.” Bosteels focuses on Borges’s various non-fiction engagements with James, which are ample, before implying that more extensive scholarship will yield up the proof of Borges’s pragmatic–as opposed to Derridean–language philosophy. This philosophy, he argues, constitutes an inherent faith in language, a belief, as Borges put it, that “language is the map of the universe.” Rather than emphasizing absence, Bosteels argues that Borges emphasizes language’s “almost boundless capacity to keep growing on a par with the changing world of percepts, affects, and concepts.” While Borges certainly swings both ways, so to speak, depending on the problematics of a given story or essay, Bosteels supplies a persuasive collation of the instances of Borges’s pragmatist thought about language.