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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 258-262 To interpret Spinoza's signature[1] is a tall order; to Borges' gambling detective Erik Lönnrot, the signature of the Jew of diamonds is as unquestionable as the coincidence between truth and error will have ever been. In "Death and the Compass," Lönnrot is shown to receive a detoured message bearing Spinoza's improbable signature in a 20th-century unnamed city (Buenos Aires). Spinoza's letter prophesied that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime, inasmuch as the paint shop in the East, the Tavern on the Rue de Toulon and the Hôtel du Nord were the 'perfect vertices of an equilateral and mystic triangle.' With the enthusiasm of a recent convert, Lönnrot, who had lived like a gambler in denial but who now senses that his moment has arrived, follows the message's hidden suggestion. He calculates the place where the fourth murder was to take place, because the ironic writ and map specified that no fourth event were to occur. This is no soft irony: 0. Hard irony is self-denying nothingness. In the late sixties and in front of an English speaking audience, Borges ended the last of his Norton lectures by reciting in the original his poem on Spinoza. On page, this gorgeous signature would have looked like this: Las traslúcidas manos del judío Howard's and Rennert's translation resigns as: The Jew's hands, translucent in the dusk, The equanimity of the afternoons and latenesses (in Spanish, 'tardes' means both) counterbalances the difference, unavailable in English, between 'brújula' ('magnetic compass') and 'compás' (compass as a geometrical instrument). While Borges' text is called "La muerte y la brújula," the latter word appears only once in the text when, with the aid of a map and of such a compass, the detective is shown to determine where the fourth murder will occur. Why does Lönnrot use the brújula to find the fourth point on the map is as much beyond him as is 'death,' the word which pairs off with brújula in the title. To use a magnetic compass when one has a map is mostly awkward, always supplementary, and silly here. Overinterpretation arises here out of the dual method of orientation provided both more geometrico & magnetico, Lönnrot proves to be a slipshod grandson of Oedipus, but the readers are not better off. Their reading compass is disoriented, and the discussion below instantiates these jumps in the magnetic field of interpretation — as if the interpreter were spiraling down as a plane about to crash. [end page 259] 1. The compass, by purifying deixis of content; becomes the allegory of senseless direction. As a Jakobsonian "pointing" (Einstellung), this direction would be the opening that sets up the six functions of language. As a Deleuzian sense, it would do other things. As details do in a baroque double vision — where the voice splits from body and spirit while addressing both the transcendental and its representations: 1.1. Borges' compass points to the void which it has become in the act of pointing. Christians call this voiding of the self as an act of self-giving — kenosis. But while Lönnrot is naked like the innocent, the readers are lured on the red carpet of aristocratic mechanics, Agamemnon-like understanding: were they will be enthroned above the troubled secular apprentice who never got the fact that the brújula is an instrument of null-pointing. But to Borges, superiority is vanity, mirrors are monstrous because they duplicate, and fame is a reflection of dreams in the dream of another mirror. Beyond enticing the reader to take part in the simulacrum of a Lönnrotlied, "DC" intimates the ataraxia of neutral reading, that mystical opposite of democracy which leads nowhere through graceful loss. "DC" cannot be but reread. This is pleonastic, for there is as little first reading of Borges as there is a literary Adam, which is why Adam had to be left to Creation and why literature had to be figured as the multitude of styles abandoned at the Creation of the world and clustered in Borges' readwritings. Deliciously repetitive, the Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher's tardes shelter the neutrality of exhaustion. He polishes the crystals (and two futile lenses for both Leibniz's divided monads and his expeditious theolatry of the best possible world) until the mirror of representation thins into nothingness. 2. In Spinoza truth is precise beyond representation, thus precisely true. The man-made god[3] is felt as the hardest substance of nature's poiesis coming out of nothing and going back there, as if life were death's detour: the diamond 2.1. Borges' Spinoza is an extreme artificer, a God-making man. 2.2. This man to his God and this God to his man are forming a diamantine structure (in the same chiastic sense in which the spirit was a bone to Hegel, the strongest of the weak). 2.3. The diamond is the counter-mirror that presents the map and the territory linked in a crystalline structure, thus free to determine each other: [end page 260] a world whose translucent form is its substance and whose substance dwells in form. 2.4. Spinoza's diamonds are ontological structures where idea and idol cross paths: after becoming each other's opposite, they come to mutually inhabit the reverse position. 2.5. The diamond dwells on the balance of expression and impression, the givenness of that gay wisdom he calls amor dei intellectualis. 2.6. The diamond is immanence visible, "the Aleph" that is neither possible nor real, but rather their mutual exposure unto virtuality. 2.7. The diamond is not livid like a blueprint nor is it murky like the latter's "realization" nor trivially necessary as any act of transcendental escapism. 2.8. Spinoza's signature is a diamond. 3. As empty deixis, Spinoza's signature directs sense without indicating it. 3.1. Sense is driven by the entelechy of meaning: it is energized and poisoned by it. 3.2. Meaning is the death drive of sense (as much as the real is the virtual's death drive). 4. A figure of empty deixis, the compass directs poiesis away from tekhné. To Lönnrot, his own end is branded by the indifference and weariness of those who understand in and as life's last flicker, that 5. The price for knowledge is death. To Borges, the trees of life and knowledge are the photographic development of one into the other: simple negations, more arresting than their denial. This cool threat is made possible in his oeuvre by the absence of patent love, the love that hopes of being loved (neoPlatonic kitsch collaborators like Marsilio Ficino ask for a payback when they stick fresh love between chaos and creation). 5.1. Lönnrot's exhaustion is pure (lying beyond the possible) and purely poietic (non-technical). The opposite exhaustion — the technocalyptic Bomb to end all possibles — would be an ekpirosis imbued with a humanism that both Spinoza and Borges regard as damaging. 5.2. Lönnrot dies tricked into meaning, so he cannot take anything with him, like a Jew or like a Catholic. As he dies of self exhaustion, the next avatar he suggests to Scharlach, the Zeno-labyrinth, acts as a different unfolding of the analogical rhomb: the reduction to an invisible line, rather than the rhomb's doubling into the diamond's octahedron. 5.3. Lönnrot's Zeno-labyrinth pairs off with Don Quijote's unaccomplished last scenario, in whose idyll he would be a shepherd sheltered from the failure of his chivalric exploits. Both are supplementary disguises, little games that end without ever having started. [end page 261] 5.4. The signs that lurk retrospectively in what once was their sheltering text are signs of life. 5.5. Death is the meaningful imperative that pastes the past onto the future. 5.6. Meaning is not aboutness. Aboutness keeps the world together in its triviality; it is a tekhné of analogies as much as analogies are the world's committee. 5.7. Ironically, death is about life. 5.8. The meaning of life is death. 5.9. As life is stranger than meaning, its memory is neither inexact nor untrue. [1]. Hardly decipherable but no less arousing, signatures in the Low Countries of the seventeenth century are self effacing. One would think of Vermeer's as Descartes is thinking of his own, although Balzac will later paint a hallo around the Frenchman's Faustianism in his erring Le chef d'œuvre inconnu, where signing and bleeding are pun-tied in French: signant/saignant, indicating the signature's low country). Like walking and breathing, signing cannot bear a signature; yet the signature of that most richly impersonal thinker, Spinoza, cuts along alien ages as the Book carried the Jews. [2]. "Spinoza" was published in 1966 (in El otro, el mismo/The Self and the Other; Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1966); the English translation, in 1972 (Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, 1923-1967 (bilingual edition), ed., intro. & notes by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: Delacorte Press, 1972: 193). [3]. In 1976 Borges published a second poem devoted to the philosopher, "Baruch Spinoza" (in La moneda de hierro (The Iron Coin)). Willis Barnstone's translation runs: "A haze of gold, the Occident lights up/The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript/Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite./Someone is building God in a dark cup./A man engenders God. He is a Jew/With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;/Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in/A river, is borne off by waters to/Its end. No matter. The magician moved/Carves out his God with fine geometry;/From his disease, from nothing, he's begun/To construct God, using the word. No one/Is granted such prodigious love as he:/The love that has no hope of being loved" (With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires, 5; for the original, see Borges' Obras completas, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1998: 3.151).
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