Expanded edition with new chapters and updates to the translation and bibliography. 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. This edition includes a new introduction by the author and three entirely new chapters, as well as updated images and corrections to the original translation. Lisa Block de Behar is Professor of Communications at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay and is a renowned Jorge Luis Borges scholar. William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of several books, including In Defense of Religious Moderation. Christopher RayAlexander is a graduate student and language instructor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle were very much alive between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The essays in this volume investigate the interaction, both in terms of harmony and contrast, between the two philosophers in early modernity, that is in a time when long-forgotten texts became available and a new philological awareness was on the rise. Dealing with famous and less famous early modern interpreters and philosophers, in a transnational and translinguistic perspective, this volume reveals the agendas behind the discussions on (...) Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies. In studying these texts, it is hard to imagine a more significant collision of big names with big ideas. This project takes us to the centre of the intellectual life of the period and its most exciting debates. (shrink)

Looking at Holocaust testimonies, which in her view always involve some form of translation, the author seeks to develop an ethics of translation in the context of Levinas’ hyperbolic ethics of responsibility. Calling on Benjamin and Derrida to make explicit the precipitous task of the translator, she argues that the translator faces an ethical call or assignation that resembles the fundamental structure of Levinasian subjectivity. The author relates the paradoxes of translation in Holocaust testimony to Levinas’ silence on the problem (...) of translation—puzzling if one considers Levinas’ focus on the ethical essence of language, his multilingualism, and the fact that he wrote his texts in a second language. She proposes that the trace of the philosopher’s displacement from his linguistic community can be discerned in his exilic conception of ethical subjectivity and in the testimonial impetus that animates his work. Thus, although Levinas’ Saying is posited as a translinguistic horizon that transcends the boundaries of a particular national language, it carries the remainder of the disavowed loss of the mother tongue. (shrink)

Elements of Symbolic Logic by Hans Reichenbach provides the first analysis of tenses from a translinguistic, transgrammatical, transcultural logical viewpoint. However, the author does not address the problem of relations between the tenses and temporality, whose investigation is devoted to physics. Despite the brilliant discovery, an irreconcilable gap between the two different epistemological perspectives emerges at a glance. Where Reichenbach stopped is precisely where one must start from to continue the exploration on the exterminated continent that one can glimpse behind (...) his study. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the consequences of two commonsensical premises in semantics and epistemology: (1) natural language is a complex system rooted in the communal life of human beings within a given environment; and (2) linguistic knowledge is essentially dependent on natural language. These premises lead me to emphasize the process-socio-environmental character of linguistic meaning and knowledge, from which I proceed to analyse a number of long-standing philosophical problems, attempting to throw new light upon them on these grounds. In (...) particular, I criticize the use of expressions such as ‘absolute truth’, ‘absolute existence’ and ‘the thing in itself’, arguing that they lead to what I call ‘the ultralinguistic paradox’ (a fatal antinomy). In the same way, I review a number of mainstream topics in philosophical semantics, epistemology and metaphysics, reformulating them in terms much more naturalistic – and less mysterious – than usual. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 224 Seiten: 295-312.