The labyrinth of time is folded back upon itself – Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth
Caption: Gottfried Leibniz, 1666 (publ. 1690). frontispiece of De Arte Combinatoria (On the Art of Combination)
Figure text: IGNIS. REMISSA. SIC-CITAS. SVM…greatness, D for eternity, E for power, F for wisdom, G for volition, H for virtue, for truth, and K for glory. The nine letters are equidistant from the center, and each is joined to all the others by chords or diagonal lines. The first of…Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor; and the professor showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences, which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give…
Jorge Luis Borges
writer · 5 mentions across 3 readings
In this course
Borges's recursive, labyrinthine fictions—exploring infinite libraries, forking paths, and systems of total documentation—provide the literary template for thinking about algorithmic generation and data synthesis in the course. His "Library of Babel" and similar works offer both aesthetic precedent and philosophical caution for artificial systems that claim to exhaust possibility or reconstruct identity through recombination; the readings invoke his architecture of exhaustion to frame contemporary concerns about cloning, archives, and the folding of information space.
Background
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magical realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Wikipedia →Mentioned in 3 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.