Foucault’s Laughter. Enumeration, Rewriting, and the Construction of the Essayist in Borges’s “The analytical language of John Wilkins”

Abstract

A curious list from one of Borges’s essays, the “Chinese encyclopedia” section, has become, beginning with Foucault’s reading, an independent, typically postmodern text that subverts rationalist concepts of order. While many critics are content with quoting the passage from Foucault to make their point, I ask how the list functions in its immediate context. I take into account the fact that in the same essay there are several other lists that display similar signs of heterogeneity, and explore in what way these lists function similarly or differently. I assume that certain genre conventions of the essay have an impact on the reading of such lists, and ask in what way a quoted list can serve to do a crucial part of the work of the essay: to construct an “essayistic I,” a textual representation of the essayist. Based on the observation that not all of the lists are fictive, I also retrace the process of artistic adaptation of non‐fictional source material, in order to gain insights into Borges’s method as a writer of essays.