Title
New Media Forms and the Strange Loop of Subjectivity in Borges’s “El milagro secreto”
Keywords
Loop of Subjectivity, Borge, El Milargo secreto
Abstract
The scene is familiar to every reader of Borges. The protagonist lies in a darkened cell, awaiting the moment of his execution. His mind too has become a prison; a frustrated writer, he circles endlessly over the possibility of not so much physical escape as artistic redemption while he takes stock of a life unremarkably lived. Then, not one but two miracles occur. The first is the sudden, unanticipated revelation of a project of the imagination that would somehow redeem him; the second, his improbable completion of that task, the syntax of his work curiously mirroring his own life in ways he cannot fathom. The loop binding life and art together is completed only at the moment of his death, as if to suggest that the subject were unable to abide the fulfillment of its own fantasy. The wheel begins to turn once more as the reader dimly begins to realize that each time the text is read, the subject comes to life, dies, and then lives again.
Original Publication Citation
“New Media Forms and the Strange Loop of Subjectivity in Borges’s ‘El milagro secreto.’” Variaciones Borges43 (2017): 3-21.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Laraway, David, "New Media Forms and the Strange Loop of Subjectivity in Borges’s “El milagro secreto”" (2017). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 50.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/philosophy_facpub/50
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
Publisher
Variaciones Borges
Language
English
College
Humanities
Department
Philosophy