Essay: Otras inquisiciones

Overview
Published in 1952, Otras inquisiciones gathers essays Borges wrote between 1937 and 1952, a period in which his metaphysical curiosity, skepticism, and playful erudition coalesce into a distinctive poetics of criticism. The collection roams through philosophy, theology, literary history, and invented scholarship, turning reading into an adventure of ideas. Rather than offering a system, it stages encounters: with Pascal’s terror of the infinite, with heretical systems and apocrypha, with mirrors, labyrinths, and the treacherous order of libraries and classifications. The result is a map of Borges’s intellectual obsessions and a primer on how he makes literature out of ideas and ideas out of literature.

Intellectual Terrain
A central thread is the instability of categories we treat as natural. Essays on language and taxonomy show how classifications are historical fictions, useful yet arbitrary. The analytic language of John Wilkins becomes a parable of the mind’s impulse to impose order and the comedy that ensues when it tries to be total. Likewise, metaphors of mirrors and spheres probe identity and infinity: the soul confronting a universe without circumference, the self multiplied and estranged by its reflections. Time, memory, and causation are tested by idealist arguments; Borges pursues the consequences with a light, ironic touch that courts paradox rather than resolves it.

Notable Essays and Motifs
La esfera de Pascal meditates on two figures for the universe: an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and a closed sphere that terrifies Pascal. Borges tracks how these metaphors govern epochs, turning cosmology into a history of images. La muralla y los libros juxtaposes the Great Wall and the burning of books ordered by Shih Huang Ti, extracting from this pairing an aesthetic emotion that exceeds historical causality; distant acts rhyme across centuries.

El idioma analítico de John Wilkins dismantles the pretense that a perfect taxonomy can mirror reality, invoking a fantastical Chinese encyclopedia to expose the contingent borders of concepts. Kafka y sus precursores reverses influence, arguing that Kafka’s style invents its ancestors, and that reading retroactively shapes tradition; the canon is not a lineage but a pattern we perceive after the fact. De las alegorías a las novelas reflects on how modern fiction preserves allegory’s structures while hiding its morals, transforming emblem into enigma.

The culminating philosophical venture, Nueva refutación del tiempo, renews Berkeleyan and Humean arguments to suggest that an absolute, homogeneous time is a fiction constructed from perceptions and memories. Borges entertains the unsettling idea that identities and events are repetitions without an original, that eternity is not duration but a network of correspondences. Elsewhere, El espejo de los enigmas and related notes on scripture and mysticism treat theology as a repertory of metaphors, where riddles and mirrors hint at a knowledge glimpsed obliquely.

Style and Method
The essays combine scrupulous citation with apocrypha, mixing scholarship and invention until both illuminate each other. Short, lapidary paragraphs condense arguments into images; contradictions are placed side by side, allowed to resonate. Translation, quotation, and summary become creative acts, and criticism takes on the economy and surprise of a short story. Borges proceeds by synecdoche and analogy, discovering in a minor anecdote a metaphysical theorem or in a footnote the seed of a fiction.

Significance
Otras inquisiciones crystallizes a way of thinking that influenced criticism and fiction alike: anachronistic, comparatist, hospitable to heresy, and skeptical of systems that ignore their own fictions. It teaches that literature is an encyclopedia of forms of wonder, that libraries are labyrinths, and that the pleasures of thought are inseparable from the pleasures of style.