The other and time

the Borgesian construction of the double and the deauthorization of the self

Abstract

This article proposes a philosophical-literary reading of the short story The Other, by Jorge Luis Borges, in light of the notions of narrative identity, metalanguage, and non-linear time. It argues that the story enacts a deconstruction of the self and memory through the paradoxical encounter between two versions of the same subject. Drawing on authors such as Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Giorgio Agamben, the text seeks to demonstrate how Borges stages the impossibility of returning to the “same” and proposes an ethics of duplication. The story is read as a radical gesture of rupture with classical categories of identity, time, and narration, establishing a poetics of the unfinished and a metaphysics of language.