Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges had a life-long fascination with philosophy, and Jacques Derrida was an avid reader of Borges. Borges’s “The wall and the books” can be read as an artistic illustration of Derrida’s concept of archive and his notion of repression as archivization. Borges’s essay revolves around two projects that a Chinese Emperor aspires to accomplish: the building of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books written prior to his own time. Using monstrously cruel methods, the Emperor attempts to gain immortality and to erase all memories of the past so that ‘history’ could begin with him. His actions and meditations can be interpreted in a dialogue with Derrida’s approach to history as an archive, and allow one to relate the notions of repression and archivization. Borges’s essay can be considered as an artistic manifestation of the parallelism between repression as a mental mechanism and as an instrument of political control, a relationship introduced by Freud and re-elaborated by Derrida in his concept of history as archive.