Having just begun

Gabriel Josipovici on Borges, Poe, the novel, Kierkegaard, Wallace Stevens...:

It may be that Borges’ mode of writing is not such as to engage fully with politics and history, like that of Sartre and Malraux; yet I would suggest that despite this his central contrast of the melancholy and resigned translator and the idealist world of Tlön is more deeply political than Sartre and Malraux could ever be, and that it helps to bring out something that is often overlooked in studies of literary Modernism:  that to write about politics without recognising the complicity of forms of writing with the formation of political consciousness is to betray the cause one thinks one is serving, and that writers  like Eliot, Stevens, Beckett and Borges may in the end be better guides to the times than Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Silone and the rest...…

Actually, I think my favorite sentence is this:

...But there’s this deplorable confusion in that modern times have incorporated ‘actuality’ into logic and then, in distraction, forgotten that ‘actuality’ in logic is still only a ‘thought actuality’, i.e. it is possibility.

 

Thoughts anyone?  Certainly a must-read essay.   (Also via RSB, readers may be interested in the new journal, Affinities:  "a web-based journal that focuses on groups, movements, and communities that set out to construct sustainable alternatives to the racist, hetero-sexist system of liberal-capitalist nation-states.")