Jorge Luis Borges and His Predecessors: Notes Towards a Materialist History of Linguistic Idealism

Read locates both the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Western ideas on language in their historical context. He reviews the theoretically diverse critical approaches to Borges’s work, including both those that collude with the texts and others that are hostile to the Argentinian writer, and argues that all are inadequate for understanding Borges. He maintains that the modern subject is now characterized by narcissism associated with philosophical skepticism.