Transnational Remaking

Abstract

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In “Avatars of the Tortoise”, Borges recalls the story of Achilles and the Tortoise, which is used to explain Zeno’s second paradox, which runs as follows: because Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise, he gives the animal a head start of ten metres. So the chase begins: Achilles runs the ten metres, while the tortoise runs just one; Achilles runs that one metre, while the tortoise runs ten centimetres; Achilles runs the ten centimetres, while the tortoise runs one centimetre; and so on to infinity. Achilles never catches the tortoise, but merely reduces the distance between them. Borges concludes that “there is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.”¹ The infinite, for Achilles, is the point at which he recognises that the gap between him and the tortoise, however far it diminishes, can never be closed. Lacan uses the same example to differentiate between two types of noncoincidence: between the subject and the Other, and between the two sexes. On the noncoincidence between subject and Other, Lacan emphasises that the tortoise is no less subordinated to this regresses infinitum than Achilles; the tortoise infinitely moves away through diminishing increments. Neither subject nor Other “arrives” then at a limit.