Abdelfattah Kilito, Borges and the Blind (original title: العميان) (original) (raw)

“Borges and the Blind” is an essay by Abdelfattah Kilito, originally titled in Arabic “العميان” (The Blind). It is published in his book في جو من النَّدَم الفكريّ (In a Spirit of Intellectual Repentance; Al-Mutawassit Books, 2020, pp. 27-33). The essay revolves around Jorge Luis Borges’s well-known story “Averroës’ Search”, which explains my choice of title—Averroës, or Ibn Rushd, was a twelfth-century Andalusian philosopher who, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics could not find Arabic equivalents to “tragedy” and “comedy”. The main idea here is that underlying Averroes’ search—or any search for that matter—is a staggering blindness to the obvious, which Kilito relates to Kafka’s statement that “[u]sually the one whom you are looking for lives next door.” Kilito’s essay is an erudite and incisive reflection on a circular and contagious kind of blindness—both physical and conceptual—which connects seemingly unrelated authors and disparate reflections across time and place.