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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones. We discuss Borges’s influence on the culture as a Poe of the 20th century, his historical and political context, his philosophical idealism and gnosticism, and his obsessions with and tropes of 1.) the mirror, the labyrinth, the library, and the encyclopedia signifying total systems of closed knowledge, on the one hand, and 2.) his other motifs of the south, the knife-fight, the gaucho, and the chaos of immediate experience, these considered as escapes from the former. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall: