SOURCE: “Tlön, Pilgrimages, and Postmodern Banality,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LXXV, No. 2, April, 1998, pp. 229–35.

In the following essay, referring to Borges's story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Almond considers Borges's relation to postmodernism.

When Heidegger was asked in an interview whether he could provide a single maxim for his readers to keep in their heads as they worked their way through his difficult, at times elusive writings, he replied (and the fact that he gave a reply at all is surprising): ‘Possibility is higher than actuality’.¹ It is a maxim which—to use a very un-Heideggerian verb—sums up many of the philosopher's own preoccupations concerning Dasein and the world: the refutation of substance (ousia) and doing (praxis) as being ontologically superior to thought and thinking (theoria), along with the dismissal of a single objective reality ‘out there’ in which one must ‘realize’ one's plans...