List of animals (Borges)

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In The Analytical Language of John Wilkins (El idioma analítico de John Wilkins), Jorge Luis Borges describes "a certain Chinese encyclopedia," the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Contents 1 Influences of the list 2 Attribution 3 See also 4 References

[edit] Influences of the list

This list, whose "discovery" Borges attributes to Franz Kuhn, has stirred considerable philosophical and literary commentary.

Michel Foucault begins his preface to The Order of Things,

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other.

Louis Sass, has suggested, in response to Borges' list, that such "Chinese" thinking shows signs of typical schizophrenic thought processes. By contrast, the prominent linguist George Lakoff has pointed out that Borges' list is similar to many categorizations of objects found in nonwestern cultures [1].

[edit] Attribution

Scholars have questioned whether the attribution of the list to Franz Kuhn is genuine. While Kuhn did indeed translate Chinese literature, Borges' works often feature many pseudo-learned references resulting in a mix of facts and fiction. To date, no evidence for the existence of such a list has been found [2].

[edit] See also

• Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges' bestiary, a catalog of fantastic animals

[edit] References

• An edition with Spanish original and English translation in parallel can be found at: Jorge Luis Borges (April 8). El idioma analítico de John Wilkins.

• A slightly different English translation is at: Jorge Luis Borges (April 8). The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. Translation by Lilia Graciela Vázquez.

• Michel Foucault (1994 (1966)). The Order of Things : An Archaeology of Human Sciences. Vintage. ISBN 0-679-75335-4.

• George Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-46804-6.

• Louis Sass (1994 (1992)). Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-54137-5.

• The DARWIN-L mailing list archive contains messages discussing the authenticity of the attribution to Franz Kuhn (search for "Borges" on page).