The plot of Jorge Luis Borges's reader-oriented narrative Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote (1939) is well known. An unnamed apologist pens a eulogy of an apocryphal symbolist poet that becomes a catalogue of both his visible and his underground or invisible works. The former consists of 19 entries, including essays, translations, and verse; latter, the subterranean, interminable heroic, peerless, and apparent raison d'etre of this pseudo-review, is of course Menard's Quixote, a fragmentary, incomplete work which coincides-word for word-with Cervantes's and yet is arguably more subtle and infinitely richer (Labyrinths 42).1It is easy to see why some of proponents of nouvelle critique (Blanchot, Genette), reception theory (Jauss), and other representatives of postmodern philosophy (Deleuze, Danto) have used this short story as paradigm of a new definition of meaning that is not fixed, ready-made, and author-oriented,2 but transient, ever-changing, and reader-oriented. Within postmodernist thought, reading is no longer a passive undertaking, but an active endeavor that, like writing itself, incorporates its own horizon of expectations to confer alternate and endless meanings on text: ambiguity is (Labyrinths 42). This infinite plurality of meanings, of course, would not be possible if idea of meaning itself had not been infused with nominalistic or lingualistic ethos of postmodern relativism, according to which meaning cannot be distinguished from discourse that voices it.It is no wonder that critical readings of Pierre Menard as a metaphor of twofold process of writing/reading have become commonplace, since this short story expresses a core belief of Borges's poetics. Menard's invisible masterpiece is only conceivable within a nominalistic, skeptical view of language as an epistemological tool, one of fundamental presuppositions of Borges's entire literary production, which Jaime Rest, Arturo Echavarria, and lately Silvia Dapia have traced back to philosophical works of Fritz Mauthner, particularly to his Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901-1902) and his Worterbuch der Philosophie (1910). As they have noted, most distinctive traits of Mauthner's ideas about language are his nominalism and his epistemological skepticism. For Mauthner, language is merely a social or communal construct based on arbitrary, conventional rules without any transcendence whatsoever. At best, language constitutes a symbolic, mnemonic device that allows its users to collect, organize, and articulate their sensations; otherwise a constant influx of sensorial data would flee mind leaving no trace, and every sensation would seem a new one. According to Mauthner, however, knowledge of world through language is impossible (Welterkenntnis [ist] durch die Sprache unmoglich) because that very same metaphorical, approximate, and self-referential nature makes it an unfit epistemological tool (Mauthner, Beitrage I: xi; trans. Weiler 175).It is precisely a nominalistic view of language such as Mauthner's that ultimately accounts for richness unveiled by Menard's method. For Mauthner, language does not properly belong to individual, but to speaking community as a whole; language is a social game in which context of speakers plays a pivotal role in act of communication: the word is understandable only through sentence, sentence only through situation, situation only through whole personality of speaker, through his whole development (Mauthner, Beitrage III: 117, trans. Dapia, 1996, 105).3 In sum, language operates like a library of sorts, a vast depository of culture, traditions, and lore, inside which it is difficult for an individual voice to resound fully; in Borges's own words: Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol, and what an innovator can change amounts to a trifle (Doctor Brodie's Report 11). …