Borges as a Public Intellectual

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges is widely regarded as a man who lived in a kind of literary utopia and for whom creative writing was a self-referential game or an ironic »re-writing« of previous texts. Related to this perception is the view that he was indifferent to politics, if not actually a reactionary who in the 1970s supported the repressive military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile. However, this article sets out to demonstrate that Borges was deeply imbued with a sense of history and was, in fact, a public intellectual who spoke out at every major crisis in Argentina’s turbulent and often dangerous politics.