A Review of David E. Johnson’s Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation (SUNY University Press, 2012, 274pp.

Gingerich, Stephen D.

English

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

Cleveland State UniversityEngagedScholarship@CSU Masthead LogoWorld Languages, Literatures, and Cultures FacultyPublicationsDepartment of World Languages, Literatures, andCultures2015“El perro de Kant": Time, Borges, Kant’s DogStephen D. GingerichCleveland State University, s.gingerich@csuohio.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clmlang_facpubPart of the Spanish Literature CommonsHow does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures atEngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications by an authorizedadministrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact library.es@csuohio.edu.Recommended CitationStephen D. Gingerich "Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation by David E. Johnson’s (review)."Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17.4 (2015): 635-639BOOK REVIEWA Review of David E. Johnson’s Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation (SUNY University Press, 2012, 274pp.)STEPHEN D. GINGERICH“EL PERRO DE KANT”: TIME, BORGES, KANT’S DOGHumor is not usually counted among the traits of good literary criticism. Kant’s Dog announces itself with an apparent joke, and in the third chap- ter, which shares the book’s name minus the subtitle, we are told that Borges takes Kant’s dog out for a walk in the park. Johnson explains that, by way of this canine constitutional, Borges offers a critique of transcen- dental philosophy’s grounding of concepts of knowledge. Though the level of wit is never as high as in “Kant’s Dog,” Johnson carries out a similar critical operation in each chapter of his book. He confronts Borges’s texts with philosophical figures and texts to which Borges alludes in Ficciones and elsewhere, and sometimes with things to which Borges does not, in fact, allude. Indeed, some of Johnson’s points of reference would have to be avant la lettre; discussions of Derrida and Derrida scholars Rodolphe Gasche and Martin Hagglund set the philosophical bar high. Other refer- ences—to Kant’s dog, Schopenhauer’s cat, the idiot god, and an in-born, mechanical human heart—clearly exist neither in reality nor in Borges’s texts. Not only does Borges walk Kant’s dog. He also refutes, time and again, Aristotle’s, then Augustine’s, then Heidegger’s understanding of time. He tries Hume’s faith in the external world. He shakes Aristotle’s confidence in the possibility of a stable, unequivocal basis for ethical decision. Invoking the texts of all three major Abrahamic religions, he calls God to the stand in order to spell out an ethics of immortality. On the one hand, Johnson is one kind of reader that Borges engenders: a scholar willing to chase down allusions and work out intricate interplay of text and intertext. But also,as we shall see, his dazzling display of expertise gives priority to thinking through, again, and beyond (if thinking through is not always also beyond) the problems that occupied Borges.Chapter 3, “Kant’s Dog,” can give us a good sense of the book as a whole. Those who know anything about Kant the man probably know of his daily walks. What we didn’t picture was the dog that accompanied him, restrained in accordance with a “philosophical leash law” meant to keep him from run- ning amok and causing his owner unexpected trouble. Johnson frames his third chapter with this story, suggested by a “key moment” in “Funes the Memorious” (91). We are reminded that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant “trots out” a dog at the precise point at which he sets out to establish the objective validity of concepts drawn from sense experience. In other words, when Kant wants to explain how the understanding manages to turn the manifold of sensation into comprehensible units, he chooses as an example our recognition of a dog as a dog. How can we say that what we see is a dog? This is the work of imagination, which often appears to be Johnson’s main concern. Neither passive nor active, neither sense nor understanding, interior nor exterior, it “inscribes the transcendental” (93). That is to say, it makes the universality of knowledge possible. But its inscription also “singu- larizes the universal,” ruining the purity of traditional categories of reality or materiality and of subjectivity or conceptuality. The imagination “makes it possible to see and name, to know or to recognize, a dog as a dog,” yet it does so at the price of “(making) it impossible that the dog will ever be one” (93).Johnson notes that Borges’s narrator in “Funes” also evokes a dog as an illustration of Funes’s discomfort that what is called a dog one minute should retain the same name the next minute. This is Kant’s dog, says Johnson, and this chapter shows how Borges’s text, by virtue of Funes’s rejection of Kant’s dog, poses an “implicit challenge to Kant” (92). Kant’s analysis of imagination acknowledges the temporal character of thought, but when Borges takes the dog out, testing the temporal synthesis of the imagination, he finds that it puts Funes in the position of being so absolutely present as to be dead, so alive as to be deceased (118-19). Borges does not improve on Kant but, rather, follows up on Kantian imagination by inscribing again the aporetic nature of the universal, of objective knowledge: we can see and know and name the dog only at the price of killing it.But Johnson’s intention is not to identify a philosophical position belonging to Borges, Kant, or even Funes. We ought to be careful not to translate “Kant’s dog” into a simple dismissal of a philosopher or of philosophy, in general. Though the challenge to Kant consists in discerning“the necessary inscription of the empirical as the impossible condition of possibility for the transcendental determination of thought and experience” (92), such an insight can hardly be ascribed to Borges, at least not rigorously, for the “condition of possibility of thought” is, in Johnson’s telling, an impos- sible one. Indeed, both Kant and Borges offer an approach to this aporia, while both, at the same time, demonstrate a failure to appreciate the radi- cality and the necessity of the aporia. In his first chapter, Johnson concludes that Borges “retreats” from the implications of his own utterances about the indeterminacy of the future by claiming a liberating effect for the concept of eternity (39) rather than a “logic of survival” whereby we live on (42). In spite of himself, Borges’s effort to save us from time estranges us from life.Johnson returns time and again to the problem of inscription, the necessity of an empirical marker that would at once ground and undermine, affirm and negate the transcendental operations that philosophy traditionally looks to as the foundation for truth, certainty, and objectivity. Inscription, Johnson argues in his introduction, is another name for imagination, and it is perhaps as a meditation on imagination that we can most easily grasp the discussions that make up the other four chapters and the Afterword of Kant’s Dog, all of which weave readings of Borges with interpretations of texts that Borges evokes. Chapter 1, “Time: For Borges,” examines Borges’s essays on time, along with canonical texts by Aristotle, Augustine, Heidegger, and Derrida, concluding that the author of “A New Refutation of Time” “retreats” from the implications of his own utterances about the indetermi­nacy of the future, and hence about time. Chapter 2, “Belief, in Translation,” combines exegeses of “Pierre Menard” and essays on translation of classics and film with a reflection on the theme of the “secret operation” of belief in Hume. For Johnson, following Borges, translation must be seen as a kind of repetition of an original that is always already a translation. In spite of a kind of structural belief to the contrary, the condition of possibility of being repeatable, and hence of being legible or comprehensible at all, is being repetitive (repeating a perfectly good original). Chapter 4, “Decisions of Hospitality,” takes up Borges’s essays on metaphor to explore the possibility of an unequivocal meaning that could ground decision-making. Reading Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” and other fictions, the decision becomes the site of ethical thinking. Echoing Derrida’s work on hospitality, which Johnson reads alongside Aristotle, Heidegger, and Augustine, he concludes that ethical decisions are always made in the face of the uncertainty that results from “irreducible metaphoricity” (146). In chapter 5, “Idiocy, the Name of God,” Johnson elaborates the interplay in “The Aleph” betweenpantheism and a number of source texts: the Bible, the Koran, Kabbala, and other theological commentaries. The ethics of immortality is no ethics at all; to be ethical, God must be mortal and if immortal, he is not only not an ethical being but impossible.Borges scholars will be interested in Johnsons book for his contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about the interpretation of specific texts and his perceptive analyses of what he refers to in the introduction as “accidental” details (9). However, any reader is bound to learn as much about Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Maimonides, Locke, and so forth as about Borges, per se. Kant’s Dog is thus also for the non-Borges specialist, a reader who is interested in what interested Borges, but not only or necessarily because it interested Borges. That a fantastical tale or a detective story can be inter­preted as an intervention in philosophical discussions of life and death, the concept and the example, time and causation, freedom and choice, and so on, the awareness of this we owe more to Borges than to any other writer in the Western canon. Recalling Borges’s equation of the imagination with Greek phantasia, Johnson asserts that “the fantastic ... is the only possible genre, not only of literature, but also of thought and life” (17). Kant’s Dog contributes to an appreciation of how seriously we should take Borges as a creative writer and thinker (Dichter und Denker, in the inimitable German idiom), but also, if I may put it this way, as a liver.As enigmatic as the title’s evocation of Kant’s dog is the designation in the subtitle of “the time of translation” as one of the book’s primary themes. It would be tempting to correct this, in fact, and insist that the concept that most orients Johnson’s readings of Borges and the myriad philosophers and literary thinkers is the imagination. Imagination temporalizes the univer- sal, inserts it into history and into mortal life. Without the imagination, the universal (and hence conceptuality and all projects of knowing) cannot be, but imagination also links the universal irrevocably and irreparably to the singular. Translation’s time is another way of talking about imagina- tion’s temporalizing function. This substitution may be advisable because of Borges’s investment in translation over imagination, which he seems to have viewed, rather than as the faculty that synthesizes universal and particular (Kant’s Einbildungskraft), in more conventional terms as the ability to pro- duce fictions. It might be news to practicing translators that translation has a time. Certainly, the act of translation—embodied, archived in any par- ticular translation—manifests a temporal relation, the past text, rendered contemporary and made available for a certain posterity. But we should not mistake this reflection on translation for the reflections of a translatorin a conventional sense, meant, as it were, for other practicing translators. Indeed, it should not surprise us that the time of translation is the time of time, translation serving as one of several means of articulating the nature of temporality. For Johnson, as he says in the introductory chapter, "Philosophy, Literature and the Accidents of Translation;' the effort to think time requires engaging the relationship between literature and philosophy, which itself requires not only speaking of that relation but entering into it as he reads literary and philosophical texts together, where both encounter each other and themselves as/at the limits of sense and understanding. For some, philosophy is born with the effort to deny poetry its transcendental significance, but it is undeniable that in this day and age philosophy and literature both enjoy a privileged discursive status in the project of plumbing the depths of human experience. The same could not be said for translation. It is often assumed to be a technical exercise of transference of meaning, celebrated for allowing wider access to thought, poetic sensibility and reflection, knowledge, and cultural manifestations. Rarely are we reminded that it, too, touches on the very emergence of sense, conscious­ness, and inventions. Kant's Dog lends translation a prestige reserved for other humanistic discourses. This task appears to coincide with Borges, whose statement about translation bears repeating: "No problem (is) as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by translation'' (cited 48). When this statement was published (in two separate essays) in 1932, it may have been a mere joke on the part of a young writer who had devoted himself to poems and essays. Humor aside, Kant's Dog demonstrates, with imagination, how Borges's life and work bear it out. STEPHEN D. GINGERICH teaches at Cleveland State University. His publi­cations on Spanish and Latin American authors treat the relationship between literature and philosophy in Hispanic intellectual traditions. Post-print standardized by MSL Academic Endeavors, the imprint of the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University, 2019 

“El perro de Kant : Time, Borges, Kant’s Dog

EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University

Cleveland State University
EngagedScholarship@CSU Masthead Logo
World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty
Publications
Department of World Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures
2015
“El perro de Kant": Time, Borges, Kant’s Dog
Stephen D. Gingerich
Cleveland State University, s.gingerich@csuohio.edu
Follow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clmlang_facpub
Part of the Spanish Literature Commons
How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at
EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications by an authorized
administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contact library.es@csuohio.edu.
Recommended Citation
Stephen D. Gingerich "Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation by David E. Johnson’s (review)."
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17.4 (2015): 635-639
BOOK REVIEW
A Review of David E. Johnson’s Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, 
and the Time of Translation (SUNY University Press, 2012, 274pp.)
STEPHEN D. GINGERICH
“EL PERRO DE KANT”: TIME, BORGES, KANT’S DOG
Humor is not usually counted among the traits of good literary criticism. 
Kant’s Dog announces itself with an apparent joke, and in the third chap- 
ter, which shares the book’s name minus the subtitle, we are told that 
Borges takes Kant’s dog out for a walk in the park. Johnson explains that, 
by way of this canine constitutional, Borges offers a critique of transcen- 
dental philosophy’s grounding of concepts of knowledge. Though the level 
of wit is never as high as in “Kant’s Dog,” Johnson carries out a similar 
critical operation in each chapter of his book. He confronts Borges’s texts 
with philosophical figures and texts to which Borges alludes in Ficciones 
and elsewhere, and sometimes with things to which Borges does not, in 
fact, allude. Indeed, some of Johnson’s points of reference would have to 
be avant la lettre; discussions of Derrida and Derrida scholars Rodolphe 
Gasche and Martin Hagglund set the philosophical bar high. Other refer- 
ences—to Kant’s dog, Schopenhauer’s cat, the idiot god, and an in-born, 
mechanical human heart—clearly exist neither in reality nor in Borges’s 
texts. Not only does Borges walk Kant’s dog. He also refutes, time and again, 
Aristotle’s, then Augustine’s, then Heidegger’s understanding of time. He 
tries Hume’s faith in the external world. He shakes Aristotle’s confidence in 
the possibility of a stable, unequivocal basis for ethical decision. Invoking 
the texts of all three major Abrahamic religions, he calls God to the stand 
in order to spell out an ethics of immortality. On the one hand, Johnson is 
one kind of reader that Borges engenders: a scholar willing to chase down 
allusions and work out intricate interplay of text and intertext. But also,
as we shall see, his dazzling display of expertise gives priority to thinking 
through, again, and beyond (if thinking through is not always also beyond) 
the problems that occupied Borges.
Chapter 3, “Kant’s Dog,” can give us a good sense of the book as a whole. 
Those who know anything about Kant the man probably know of his daily 
walks. What we didn’t picture was the dog that accompanied him, restrained 
in accordance with a “philosophical leash law” meant to keep him from run- 
ning amok and causing his owner unexpected trouble. Johnson frames his 
third chapter with this story, suggested by a “key moment” in “Funes the 
Memorious” (91). We are reminded that in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant 
“trots out” a dog at the precise point at which he sets out to establish the 
objective validity of concepts drawn from sense experience. In other words, 
when Kant wants to explain how the understanding manages to turn the 
manifold of sensation into comprehensible units, he chooses as an example 
our recognition of a dog as a dog. How can we say that what we see is a 
dog? This is the work of imagination, which often appears to be Johnson’s 
main concern. Neither passive nor active, neither sense nor understanding, 
interior nor exterior, it “inscribes the transcendental” (93). That is to say, it 
makes the universality of knowledge possible. But its inscription also “singu- 
larizes the universal,” ruining the purity of traditional categories of reality or 
materiality and of subjectivity or conceptuality. The imagination “makes it 
possible to see and name, to know or to recognize, a dog as a dog,” yet it does 
so at the price of “(making) it impossible that the dog will ever be one” (93).
Johnson notes that Borges’s narrator in “Funes” also evokes a dog as an 
illustration of Funes’s discomfort that what is called a dog one minute should 
retain the same name the next minute. This is Kant’s dog, says Johnson, 
and this chapter shows how Borges’s text, by virtue of Funes’s rejection of 
Kant’s dog, poses an “implicit challenge to Kant” (92). Kant’s analysis of 
imagination acknowledges the temporal character of thought, but when 
Borges takes the dog out, testing the temporal synthesis of the imagination, 
he finds that it puts Funes in the position of being so absolutely present as 
to be dead, so alive as to be deceased (118-19). Borges does not improve on 
Kant but, rather, follows up on Kantian imagination by inscribing again the 
aporetic nature of the universal, of objective knowledge: we can see and 
know and name the dog only at the price of killing it.
But Johnson’s intention is not to identify a philosophical position 
belonging to Borges, Kant, or even Funes. We ought to be careful not 
to translate “Kant’s dog” into a simple dismissal of a philosopher or of 
philosophy, in general. Though the challenge to Kant consists in discerning
“the necessary inscription of the empirical as the impossible condition of 
possibility for the transcendental determination of thought and experience” 
(92), such an insight can hardly be ascribed to Borges, at least not rigorously, 
for the “condition of possibility of thought” is, in Johnson’s telling, an impos- 
sible one. Indeed, both Kant and Borges offer an approach to this aporia, 
while both, at the same time, demonstrate a failure to appreciate the radi- 
cality and the necessity of the aporia. In his first chapter, Johnson concludes 
that Borges “retreats” from the implications of his own utterances about the 
indeterminacy of the future by claiming a liberating effect for the concept 
of eternity (39) rather than a “logic of survival” whereby we live on (42). In 
spite of himself, Borges’s effort to save us from time estranges us from life.
Johnson returns time and again to the problem of inscription, the 
necessity of an empirical marker that would at once ground and undermine, 
affirm and negate the transcendental operations that philosophy traditionally 
looks to as the foundation for truth, certainty, and objectivity. Inscription, 
Johnson argues in his introduction, is another name for imagination, and it 
is perhaps as a meditation on imagination that we can most easily grasp the 
discussions that make up the other four chapters and the Afterword of Kant’s 
Dog, all of which weave readings of Borges with interpretations of texts that 
Borges evokes. Chapter 1, “Time: For Borges,” examines Borges’s essays 
on time, along with canonical texts by Aristotle, Augustine, Heidegger, 
and Derrida, concluding that the author of “A New Refutation of Time” 
“retreats” from the implications of his own utterances about the indetermi­
nacy of the future, and hence about time. Chapter 2, “Belief, in Translation,” 
combines exegeses of “Pierre Menard” and essays on translation of classics 
and film with a reflection on the theme of the “secret operation” of belief in 
Hume. For Johnson, following Borges, translation must be seen as a kind 
of repetition of an original that is always already a translation. In spite of a 
kind of structural belief to the contrary, the condition of possibility of being 
repeatable, and hence of being legible or comprehensible at all, is being 
repetitive (repeating a perfectly good original). Chapter 4, “Decisions of 
Hospitality,” takes up Borges’s essays on metaphor to explore the possibility 
of an unequivocal meaning that could ground decision-making. Reading 
Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” and other fictions, the decision becomes 
the site of ethical thinking. Echoing Derrida’s work on hospitality, which 
Johnson reads alongside Aristotle, Heidegger, and Augustine, he concludes 
that ethical decisions are always made in the face of the uncertainty that 
results from “irreducible metaphoricity” (146). In chapter 5, “Idiocy, the 
Name of God,” Johnson elaborates the interplay in “The Aleph” between
pantheism and a number of source texts: the Bible, the Koran, Kabbala, and 
other theological commentaries. The ethics of immortality is no ethics at 
all; to be ethical, God must be mortal and if immortal, he is not only not an 
ethical being but impossible.
Borges scholars will be interested in Johnsons book for his contributions 
to ongoing scholarly debates about the interpretation of specific texts and his 
perceptive analyses of what he refers to in the introduction as “accidental” 
details (9). However, any reader is bound to learn as much about Kant, 
Heidegger, Derrida, Maimonides, Locke, and so forth as about Borges, per 
se. Kant’s Dog is thus also for the non-Borges specialist, a reader who is 
interested in what interested Borges, but not only or necessarily because it 
interested Borges. That a fantastical tale or a detective story can be inter­
preted as an intervention in philosophical discussions of life and death, the 
concept and the example, time and causation, freedom and choice, and so 
on, the awareness of this we owe more to Borges than to any other writer 
in the Western canon. Recalling Borges’s equation of the imagination with 
Greek phantasia, Johnson asserts that “the fantastic ... is the only possible 
genre, not only of literature, but also of thought and life” (17). Kant’s Dog 
contributes to an appreciation of how seriously we should take Borges as a 
creative writer and thinker (Dichter und Denker, in the inimitable German 
idiom), but also, if I may put it this way, as a liver.
As enigmatic as the title’s evocation of Kant’s dog is the designation in 
the subtitle of “the time of translation” as one of the book’s primary themes. 
It would be tempting to correct this, in fact, and insist that the concept that 
most orients Johnson’s readings of Borges and the myriad philosophers and 
literary thinkers is the imagination. Imagination temporalizes the univer- 
sal, inserts it into history and into mortal life. Without the imagination, 
the universal (and hence conceptuality and all projects of knowing) cannot 
be, but imagination also links the universal irrevocably and irreparably to 
the singular. Translation’s time is another way of talking about imagina- 
tion’s temporalizing function. This substitution may be advisable because of 
Borges’s investment in translation over imagination, which he seems to have 
viewed, rather than as the faculty that synthesizes universal and particular 
(Kant’s Einbildungskraft), in more conventional terms as the ability to pro- 
duce fictions. It might be news to practicing translators that translation has 
a time. Certainly, the act of translation—embodied, archived in any par- 
ticular translation—manifests a temporal relation, the past text, rendered 
contemporary and made available for a certain posterity. But we should 
not mistake this reflection on translation for the reflections of a translator
in a conventional sense, meant, as it were, for other practicing translators. 
Indeed, it should not surprise us that the time of translation is the time of 
time, translation serving as one of several means of articulating the nature 
of temporality. 
For Johnson, as he says in the introductory chapter, "Philosophy, 
Literature and the Accidents of Translation;' the effort to think time 
requires engaging the relationship between literature and philosophy, 
which itself requires not only speaking of that relation but entering into it 
as he reads literary and philosophical texts together, where both encounter 
each other and themselves as/at the limits of sense and understanding. For 
some, philosophy is born with the effort to deny poetry its transcendental 
significance, but it is undeniable that in this day and age philosophy 
and literature both enjoy a privileged discursive status in the project of 
plumbing the depths of human experience. The same could not be said for 
translation. It is often assumed to be a technical exercise of transference of 
meaning, celebrated for allowing wider access to thought, poetic sensibility 
and reflection, knowledge, and cultural manifestations. Rarely are we 
reminded that it, too, touches on the very emergence of sense, conscious­
ness, and inventions. Kant's Dog lends translation a prestige reserved for 
other humanistic discourses. This task appears to coincide with Borges, 
whose statement about translation bears repeating: "No problem (is) as 
consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by 
translation'' (cited 48). When this statement was published (in two separate 
essays) in 1932, it may have been a mere joke on the part of a young writer 
who had devoted himself to poems and essays. Humor aside, Kant's Dog 
demonstrates, with imagination, how Borges's life and work bear it out. 
STEPHEN D. GINGERICH teaches at Cleveland State University. His publi­
cations on Spanish and Latin American authors treat the relationship 
between literature and philosophy in Hispanic intellectual traditions. 
Post-print standardized by MSL Academic Endeavors, the imprint of the 
Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University, 2019 


https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1138&amp;context=clmlang_facpub

“El perro de Kant : Time, Borges, Kant’s Dog

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

EngagedScholarship @ Cleveland State University