ABOUT THIS BOOK

Games of Inheritance explores the thought of Argentine author and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on questions of authorship and literary tradition. The book focuses on Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions, highlighting the role of this engagement in developing and expressing his views on these questions. The book argues that the primary relevance of Borges’s persistent reference to “the Judaic” is not for understanding his attitude toward Jews and Judaism but for understanding his position in contemporary Argentinian debates about nationalism and literature, empire and postcolonialism, and populism and aesthetics. By broadening the frame of Borges and the Judaic, this book shifts the scholarly focus to the poetic utility of Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions. This allows a better understanding of the nuance of his views on the issues that most animate his oeuvre: authorship and writing, literature and tradition.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

YITZHAK LEWIS is an assistant professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan University, China. He is the author of A Permanent Beginning: R. Nachman of Braslav and Jewish Literary Modernity.

REVIEWS

"While literary critics have identified a connection between Borges and Kabbalistic writing since the 1970s, Lewis argues that these links are merely a 'web of allusions' intended to comment on literary traditions and evoke mystical elements in his narratives rather than conveying any genuine or deliberate religious or philosophical significance. . . . Recommended."

— Choice

"Lewis' study of what he calls the Judaic 'web of allusions' in Jorge Luis Borges' writing opens new interpretative possibilities implied in the positing of a marrano gesture at the dead center of twentieth-century Latin American literature. Lewis' endeavor engages with a Borgesian literary politics on the other side of national allegories or any kind of identity postulation. Borgesian dissidence establishes a horizon of and for literature that still today remains unthought in the Latin American and Spanish archive."— Alberto Moreiras, author of Uncanny Rest: For Antiphilosophy

"Games of Inheritance dares scholars to shift their thinking from questions of accuracy and influence in Borges's engagement with the Jewish textual tradition and focus instead on Borges's imagined invention of 'the Judaic.' Lewis's speculative and novel claim will inspire scholars both inside and outside Jewish studies, Latin American studies, and comparative literature to move beyond biography in order to rethink Borges under the sign of a modern 'kabbalistic prophet.'"— Kitty Millet, author of Kabbalah and Literature

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: A Game of Inheritance
- The Judaic
- From Kabbalah to Tradition (the Structure of the Argument)
- Methodological Notes

Section I: Kabbalah

Chapter 1: Kabbalistic Stories
- Kabbalistic Methodologies
- Encountering Scholem
Chapter 2: The Ideal Author
- A Vindication of the Author
- What is an Author?
- Another Creation Story
- Cabal and Complot
- A Comment on Literature and Conspiracy
Chapter 3: The Ideal Reader
- Borges’ Parable of the Cave
- The Narrator and the Kabbalist
- Kabbalah and Tradition

Chapter 4: The Trouble with Tradition
- Literary Tradition
- Jewish Tradition
- National Tradition
- Tradition in the Historical Sense
- The Postwar Question of Tradition
Chapter 5: What is Jewish Tradition?
- First Rejection: The Essential
- Second Rejection: The Original
- Third Rejection: The Rupture
- The Departure from Tradition
- Veblen, An Imbalanced Analogy
- Veblen, An Evolving Analogy
Chapter 6: Tradition and Local Color
- Between Jewish and Israeli Literature
- “The Memory of Israel is in Agnon”
- Between Tradition and Local Color
- Bring on the Camels

Chapter 7: Authorship and its Metaphors
- Hasidism
- The Sphere of In-Between
- Kafka and his Precursors
- A New Metaphor for Authorship
Conclusion: Borges and his Kafkaesque Precursors