Prisoner of the Book. The Living Constitution and Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Sand

This paper uses Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Book of Sand” (1975) to examine the aversion of Constitutional Originalists in the United States to the idea of the Constitution as a living text. The terror of the Living Constitution can be understood as the terror of a living book, with a meaning that is eternally shifting, displaying an animism with which the Constitution as a legal document is confronted. Contrasting Justice Antonin Scalia’s rhetoric of magic as used to denounce the “Living Constitution” with Justice William J. Brennan’s conception of an Originalist Constitution as an anachronistic document terrorizing the present, the paper asks what vision of the text these metaphors construct, and how they make the Constitution of the other into a “nightmarish” object. Using Peter Brooks’ Freudian model of the text as transference, it then tries to make sense of textual authority within an infinity of interpretative possibilities. A relational model is proposed in which text and reader are both changed by a dialogical encounter, and in which anxiety towards the Living Constitution shows itself as anxiety around the self-changing dialogue of meaning-making

Art · Art history · Constitution · Political science · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Law · Philosophy