Hermeneutics of Oblivion: Around an Unpublished Poem Posthumously Attributed to Borges

Abstract

This paper is based on a handwritten poem posthumously attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, entitled “Here. Today”, and edited by the Colombian critic Abad Faciolince. Without going into the problem of the authenticity of this poem, what interests is its metaphysical argument, in its connection with what is characterized here as an “hermeneutics of forgetting”, summoning Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and other philosophers who have inaugurated a reflection on the forgetting with phenomenological, ontological, anthropological-existential, and historical roots. In particular, the author polarizes an (in)existential thought of forgetting through the notion of Nachleben with which Benjamin, in his early work, approaches the theme of the ruin and the spectrality.