Literature and the Political

MARTIN PLOT

West Hollywood

Seminario; The Spring 2013 Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series; 2013

The Aesthetics and Politics Program, CalArts

As opposed to the conventional view of Borges as an a-political author, I make here the somehow bold claim that Borges should be rather regarded as the quintessential political writer, a writer whose most deeply interrogated and frequently revisited concerns have been astonishingly close to those that have dominated twentieth-century political thought as well. Politics – for those thinkers I will call the “thinkers of the political: Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Claude Lefort” – is what happens in cabinets and “super-PACs,” in Congress and campaign committees, in City Councils and the UN Security Council. The political, on the other hand, is something different – not entirely different of course, but different at the analytical level. However, the thinkers of the political opposed – or, rather, superimposed – different things to what each of them agreed to call politics—i.e. to the everyday conduct of common affairs. So in this presentation I analyze what each of them understood by the political and how some of Borges’ most emblematic short stories engaged those notions.