enowning
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
 
Jorge Luis Borges on the origin of one man's emigration, from the story Guayaquil.
Dr. Eduardo Zimmerman, as the reader perhaps may know, is a foreign-born historian driven from his homeland by the Third Reich and now an Argentine citizen. Of his professional work (doubtlessly estimable), I know at first hand only an article in vindication of the Semitic republic of Carthage (which posterity has judged through the writings of Roman historians, its enemies) and an essay of sorts which contends that government should function neither visibly nor by appeal to emotion. This hypothesis was thought worthy of refutation by Martin Heidegger, who proved decisively (using photocopies of newspaper headlines) that the modern head of state, far from being anonymous, is in fact the protagonistes, the khoragos, the David whose dancing (assisted by the pageantry of the stage, and with unapologetic recourse to the hyperboles of the art of rhetoric) enact the drama of his people. Heidegger likewise proved that Zimmerman was of Hebrew, not to say Jewish, descent. That article by the venerable existentialist was the immediate cause of our guest's exodus and subsequent nomadism.

Pp. 76-77
 
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