Games of Inheritance

Games of Inheritance explores the thought of Argentine author and public intellectual Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) on questions of authorship and literary tradition. The book focuses on Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions, highlighting the role of this engagement in developing and expressing his views on these questions. The book argues that the primary relevance of Borges’s persistent reference to “the Judaic” is not for understanding his attitude toward Jews and Judaism but for understanding his position in contemporary Argentinian debates about nationalism and literature, empire and postcolonialism, and populism and aesthetics. By broadening the frame of Borges and the Judaic, this book shifts the scholarly focus to the poetic utility of Borges’s engagement with Jewish literary and intellectual traditions. This allows a better understanding of the nuance of his views on the issues that most animate his oeuvre: authorship and writing, literature and tradition.