It is time to introduce the four themes that constitute Jorge Luis Borges’ list. It was not articulated by Borges as such, but rather the conclusion of on of his editor-translators, James Irby (“Introduction,” Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby; New York: New Directions, 1962). Irby emphasized the economy by which Borges needed no other literary devices than the ones he culled from world literature from ancient times to present. Technically, they belong to the genre known as “the fantastic,” but this is to limit what is a broad if not universal function of interrelated narrative forms. These are, simply, the double, travel through time, the story in the story, and the contamination of reality by the dream or work of fiction. It is evident that each element could easily include the others within its list of sub-forms, so Borges’ list has the same self-intersecting quality as Bloom’s. It is a system of synechdocal “part for whole,” but with a moving center that, placed over each category, adjust tone, focus, and style.

• The Double. The Double’s most characteristic form is the pair of twins who embody contrasting if not conflicting traits, from the mortal/immortal pair, Castor and Pollux, to the macabre team of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, good and evil personified. In ancient cultures twins were universally feared and often murdered at birth. In myth however they populate freely stories about heroes (almost all original stories of the classical heroes, such as Hercules, specify two twin heroes), with the story itself imposing rules of separation, such as Castor and Pollux’s alternation between life and death as a means of salvaging Castor’s mortality and accidental death. The ambigious cyclicality of the neural–perceptual circuit seems to derive from the twins relation to the horizon or solar cycle rotating the antipodal twins between two world. Are the twins defined by their 180º separation, their 360º horizontal pathway, or the fact that their circuit is by definition itself twinned into a double circuit, 720º? The positions along this rotation schema are cross-inscribed. Jentsch’s uncanny formula of Ad/Da becomes Castor and Pollux’s Cp/Pc or Stevenson’s Jh/Hj. The criss-cross invokes the rule of the non-bijective thaumatrope of the Borromeo knot, the Joycean riddle, or the forced choice of Lacan’s union-without-intersection Euler circles. The doubles theme is another way of invoking the necessity of the void.
• Travel though time. This is a normal feature in the Freudian-Lacanian field, if only because the Unconscious is incapable of keeping track of time, using negation to equalize the forward logic of action and speech with the retroactive (après coup) closure that seals the relation between the logically original trauma and the experiential first encounter with the symptom (all symptom encounters are, in psychoanalysis, technically hapax phenomenon, or “first times”). Although time travel would seem to be a modern motif (cf. H. G. Wells The Time Machine, 1895), mythic thought begins with the idea of time structured by the “eternal return,” the unary trait revealed through divination and formalized through cyclic annual holidays/rituals. In the ancient year, gaps created by the imperfect overlap of solar and lunar counts led to holidays where social roles were reversed, as in the case of the Roman Saturnalia, carried forward to the modern-day carnival on Mardi gras. Here, the double bond between master and servant is, in reversal, played out in distinctively Hegelian terms, which Lacan formalized in the Master’s Discourse. In brief, the Master fights to the death for recognition, with the illogical outcome that, if this project should succeed, there would be no other masters able to give the required respect. Instead, it is the Servant, who has opted out of this demand/fight who respects the master but is disqualified thanks to his status as a servant from supplying what is required, except Symbolically, though servitude. The Master’s Discourse mimics the suppression of the latent signifier in metaphor with the “symptom” as the servant who emerges (from the ground-floor kitchen?) to present the food, services, and other goods that have “cooked” out of sight of the Master.

  

• Story in the Story. Each story is told, by definition. Each story–teller is by definition a liar, but a liar who begins by proclaiming the principle of ex falso sequitur quodlibit — “from the false proceeds everything,” in an explosion of possibilities. The story–teller is automatically the “unreliable narrator” in this relation to the ex falso position, but this logical status can be transferred to a character inside the story whose point of view is damaged or limited in some way. Plato, in his dialogs, makes extensive use of the unreliable narrator; in fact he universalizes the principle of unreliability in his critique of the standard measure of truth as “justified true belief.” The Gettier Problem begins proper with Plato’s interrogations, which always leave the JTB model found wanting. Since there is no justification that is not the speech of someone, there is no someone who is in possession of the “meta-language” implied or required by truth, in that truth is always dependent on an idea of the truth of truth. The geometry of the story in the story appears to be a set of concentric circles, but the logic is more of the Thesean Labyrinth, which is extimate in its ouroboros-like conversion of inside to outside. Thanks to its fractal folds, the labyrinth equalizes motions to the inside and outside, making prison and refuge into the complex contronym of “shelter” — an idempotent insulation again featuring the idea of the unary trait!
• Contamination of Reality (by the dream or work of fiction). Lacan’s non-intersecting Euler circles define a void that is the “forbidden boundary” separating the present from the past, the self from others, good from evil,  life from death. All of these radically distinguished zones contribute to a conflation of the value of the boundary, which can be a river, horizon, “line in the sand,” edge of a silhouette, resolution of a riddle, completion of a task — anything where the idea of a circuit completion is present. Once a circle completes its round, the space “inside” seems inviolable. To break it is to violate the rule by which 359º got to be 360º. But, topology complicates the situation, for on a sphere (arguably, all human life takes place in spherical space), the difference between inside and outside is relative. The American 19c. Army general sent to fight the confederation of Plains Indians could claim to have surrounded the circling

  

  native combatants, although most would say that it was the Army that was surrounded. Lacan identified extimity as a primary if not primordial dynamic of the human subject, where the authority of the external Other was inscribed within the subject’s deepest interior point, and the clearly “objective”  Other, in reality a construct of subjectivity’s need to externalize the idea of authority, was in fact a locus of intimacy. Like Jentsch’s Ad/Da dyad, inside and outside for psychoanalysis is Ei/Ie, an “intimate exterior” and “objective-external interior.” Neither category subsists for very long, however, because extimacy is a process of conversion/inversion. The 180º is always flipping to 360º, the 360º is always doubling to 720º, and every circle in projective geometry, including the horizon, folds in half, but with a twist. Thus, itwould be easy to say that the contamination of reality is the centerpiece of Borges’ four categories, that the list is basically a 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d. However, it is time, thanks to the theme of contamination, to consider another idea passed to us by Lacan: the Klein-Cayley group. In this matrix, there is a fourth term that embodies theprinciple of A=A, so that when it combines with any of the abc elements, the element itself is given, and e=e. But, like the Borromeo rings, the combination of any of the abc elements as pairs gives the value of the missing element: a+b=c, etc. The third element becomes the “latent value” of the interaction of any two elements, and key to the self-identical or idempotent function of the value itself, as when in the Borromeo rings, the pattern of voids/absences is symmetrical. The difference is the symmetry and the symmetry is the difference. This chiasmus is possible only because of the “e” that represents the position and role of the void, which in the Euler rings union without intersection constitutes the axis by which suppression results in the  instantaneous, portable symptom.