Borges

"Barthes once wrote that the only way to read a work of passion is with another work of passion. What was true for Barthes is equally true for Lisa Block de Behar, whose three or more decades of scholarly activity have produced an imposing body of scholarship on the work of Jorge Luis Borges, but more importantly and more urgently have resulted in the invention of a new way of thinking about the activity of reading and the nature of meaning itself." - From the introduction by William Egginton

Borges cites innumerable authors in the pages making up his life's work, and innumerable authors have cited and continue to cite him. More than a figure, then, the quotation is an integral part of the fabric of his writing, a fabric made anew by each reading and each re-citation it undergoes, in the never-ending throes of a work-in-progress. Block de Behar makes of this reading a plea for the very art of communication; a practice that takes community not in the totalized and totalizable soil of pre-established definitions or essences, but on the ineluctable repetitions that constitute language as such, and that guarantee the expansiveness-through etymological coincidences of meaning, through historical contagions, through translinguistic sharings of particular experiences-of a certain index of universality.