Chapter 3 Immanence with a (Negative) Difference: Spinoza, Borges, and Barth
In: Literature and the Encounter with ImmanenceSearch for other papers by Zachary Tavlin in
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Abstract: In this essay I read Spinoza’s Ethics, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion” in a way that mimics the tripartite apparatus espoused by the author of the last – Spinoza as author, Borges’ story as text, and Barth as reader. In so doing, I will address the implications of an historically immanent reading that takes seriously the ‘death of the author’ as a transcendent guarantee of meaning while also investigating the way subjectivity remains embedded within the structure of the literary text. This essay ultimately articulates a challenge that these two texts, together, raise for a postmodern reading, one that charts a way out of its own state of ‘exhaustion’.