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“When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.
-Borges, “The Immortals”
Reading the postscript of Borges’ “The Immortals,” which suggests the entire story is a collage of other texts, I remembered how it felt to reach the end of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” in Harper’s (back in 2007) and realize the entire essay is composed of quotations, including one from Harry Truman. But Lethem’s essay is a polemic, and perhaps one that gives in to its ecstasy. Abstract critiques of originality (my favorite is probably Adorno’s “Gold Assay” aphorism in Minima Moralia) don’t translate 1:1 into political policy. For that, I got around to Caleb Crain’s essay on intellectual piracy today, a more sober take on how intellectual property is circumstantially eked out, from one technology to the next.
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