Chaos and Cosmos: The Imaginary and the Political in Jorge Luis Borges (Social Imaginaries)

Choice 2025 Outstanding Academic TitleThis book offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political.While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation.As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form.This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary