Cy-Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

by Stefan Herbrechter (Editor), Ivan Callus (Editor)

Cy-Borges—this compound word seems almost destined. It allows the associations of cyber—and cyborg to converge around the name of Jorge Luis Borges, many of whose writings are strangely prescient thought-experiments in the impossible and the unconfigurable. For though Borges speaks scantily of technology and hardly at all of the cyber-cultural futures that make it possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings contrive glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more typically associated with writers like William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or films like Blade Runner and The Matrix. Yet the posthuman, as that which reconfigures the actual and the possible once technology re-engineers human potential and institutes a new physics, is everywhere in Borges. As this collection shows through a series of close readings of his work, Borges is therefore the precursor whom posthumanism would have had to invent had he not existed.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Stefan Herbrechter is a freelance writer, academic, researcher and translator. Until 2014, he was Reader in Cultural Theory and Director of Postgraduate Studies (Media) at Coventry University. In 2015, he was a Senior Fellow at the IKKM in Weimar. Currently, he is a research fellow at Coventry University, Leeds Trinity University and Privatdozent at Heidelberg University.

He is the author and editor of a number of volumes, articles and contributions on literature, critical and cultural theory and cultural studies. Together with Ivan Callus, University of Malta he is editor and author of Critical Posthumanisms. He is also one of the co-directors of the Critical Posthumanism Network.