Estudios de la Economía

[The Journal of Cultural Economy acaba de publicar mi ensayo “Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and contemporary economic sociology”. Como suele pasar, el texto este es y no es sobre lo que dice ser que es. Así empieza]

“Misreading as a method

One of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s distinctive positions was the role he assigned to reading. In his essay ‘Sobre los clásicos,’ for instance, Borges argued that a book turns out to be a classic not necessarily in response to its merits but because some books are read by different generations ‘with mysterious loyalty’ (Borges 2012, p. 384). Similarly, he proposed, ‘literary genres depend less, perhaps, on the texts than on the way these texts are read’ (Borges 1980, p. 72, my translation). This position, as Ricardo Piglia, another great Argentinian writer, explains, entails important consequences. Borges created a form of writing where reading’s ‘deliberate mistakes,’ for instance, ‘reading philosophy as it if were science fiction,’ (Piglia 2005, p. 25, my translation) is a means of creating new literature. Of course, I would not dare to compare what I write, here or anywhere else, to Borges’s writing. This short essay, though, could be labeled a ‘Borgesian test’ – an exploration whose method is a form of deliberate misreading”