In preparing my response to the conversation between Sarah Hammerschlag and Taylor Moore, I came across Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Finding it highly relevant to the issues at stake, I searched for the precise reference in Hammerchlag and Moore’s scholarship, but I could not locate it even though I had convinced myself that one of them had mentioned this story. They both make literary fiction part of their reflections on method, and Moore even cites another Borges story, “The Circular Ruins,” in her response to Hammerschlag. I eventually found the reference I was looking for but not in works by Hammerschlag or Moore. I will return to this.   

For now, I want to indicate that Borges’s story begins in precisely this way. The narrator and his friend scramble to find a missing bibliographic reference to a place called Tlön. After many twists and turns, we find out that Tlön is the name of a fictitious country invented by a secret society centuries ago. For the members of that society, only thought is real; the concrete details of the material world are an illusion. The inventors of Tlön intend to take over the supposedly illusory world and remake it according to their abstract models.

As I was reading, I came across the narrator’s reference to the year 1937: the time he and his friends are tracking down this reference. Why would Borges, in 1940, the year the story was published, have his narrator be an exemplar of scholarly erudition about a non-existent world? After all, quite horrifying things were happening in 1940, with repercussions everywhere. Much of the story is laced with humor, light but detectable. Is the story a parody of an erudition that refuses contact with the real world? Perhaps, but many other readings could also be true. In any case, Borges knew precisely what time it was.

The final page of the story makes this crystal clear. Tlön’s abstractions, we are told, are no longer the purview of a small, secret society. They have now entered our world and bent reality to them. The narrator names dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, and Nazism as the now open manifestations of Tlön. Humans become entranced because Tlön, being a system in which everything fits, provides a semblance of order. “How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet?” asks Borges. But why would we need this completely artificial order? The answer follows, in my paraphrase: We succumb to a specious order because reality eludes us. It remains messy and full of inconsistencies, hiding its coherence. Because we want to make everything fit into a frame, we forget that these schemes are not reality itself. “Enchanted by its rigor,” the narrator states, “humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels.” Borges shows that the consequences are dire: our individual memories, our diverse languages, and our multiple fields of knowledge will all be replaced by the artificial pattern imposed by Tlön. “The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world.”

This may be a good time to go back to where I finally find the reference to Borges’s story—in a 2025 article, “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America,” about an influential far-right blogger and friend of the mega-rich and powerful. In direct reference to Borges, Yarvin founds Tlön: a society of online insiders whose ideas would infiltrate the world and replace it. His schemes include “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and transferring power eventually to a C.E.O.-in-chief, who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” Yarvin operates with the unabashed conviction that a system of ideas can be fabricated from scratch, neither emerging from concrete details nor responsive to change. “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,” Yarvin proclaims. He is a prime example of someone who simply imposes a system of abstractions on the real.

What are we supposed to do in the face of reason being derailed, and reason is always derailing? The narrator in Borges’s story says that he will simply go on revising an already existing Spanish translation of an English poem: Browne’s Urn Burial. Perhaps Borges means that the only prophylactic against abstract frames is staying close to the concrete words of someone else; in interpreting them, we remain aware that we are merely revising and what are we revising is a poem about our common mortality. We are never above and outside the people whom we are trying to understand, but in the same unruly mess.

I have indulged in this long preamble because I find in the conversation between Hammerschlag and Moore and in their work a very similar concern with the derailment of reason, a reason riding roughshod over reality. Reason, as a totalizing system, can never coincide with reality. When it works as it should, reason recognizes its own limits. Reason is both what derails—does injustice to the real—and what, if we stick closely to concrete expressions, can preserve our humanity.

Our respective fields of study (I am a historian of religions) were built on totalizing evolutionary schemes in which all peoples were made to fit into a rigid hierarchy of ascending worth, with Black Africans at the bottom. As we know, this mental scheme caused enormous destruction. In their own way, Hammerschlag and Moore show how the very disciplines within which we work have been shaped conceptually by this prior history, attempting to recover in the process what was erased, bringing it back into our memory and into our language, through a revision of key concepts. The “fetish,” for example, rather than remaining a derogatory term for the irrationality of people placed lower on the evolutionary scale, becomes useful for describing our own mental workings, denoting both misguided reasoning and our inspired interactions with our subjects of study. 

Hammerschlag and Moore are both highly aware that we scholars are prone to do violence to the people whose voices we want to restore, thus their desire to “read otherwise” (Hammerschlag) and to engage in “decolonial materialism” and the “amulet tale” (Moore)—keeping them close to the material objects or texts of the actual people in the story they inevitably construct. Hammerschlag and Moore both remark on the moment of untranslatable particularity, which defies all our theories, in the presence of the archive—whether it be text or a material object. This moment puts them in the presence of the lives whose traces these are. Their writings follow from this encounter.   

Nonetheless, I have questions for Hammerschlag and Moore based on the inevitable tension between particular voices and theory.

I was impressed by what Moore uncovered in “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Magical Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt.” In her telling, a mute object in a British archive becomes part of a dynamic of large-scale commerce and war—inseparable from the slave trade conducted by Ottoman Turks and Egyptians. Black East Africans, occulted from the official record, become the center piece of the story in their suffering and resilience. In enacting what Moore calls “decolonial materialism,” she displaces the Western geographical and ideological frame in which these objects usually appear. As Moore acknowledges, this still leaves out the metaphysical and spiritual meaning that objects like the rhinoceros horn had for the East Africans displaced from their homes. In this context, I wondered why Moore addresses Winifred Blackman’s collection of objects but does not substantively engage with any part of Blackman’s book, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, which is referenced in her article. Moore says that it is from the work of anthropologists like Blackman, part of the mechanism of empire that dislocated those objects and those people, from which we, ironically, can learn something about Upper Egyptian women’s practices and beliefs. Moore mentions that Blackman herself used the rhinoceros horn against snake bites, if I understood correctly, and that she spent seven years in an Egyptian village. Can Moore’s calling as a medium (“I approach my work as a historian and as a storyteller as an act of mediumship”) be fulfilled without passing through verbal expression, which is what a book is? I go back to the image from Borges of revising a translation of an original poem. Blackman’s translation surely needs revision and it is no easy task, but is the passage through texts not obligatory? Does Moore think that interpreting verbal expression is someone else’s task? Moore presents her method as just one way in, but is Blackman’s book so tainted by bias that it is worthless?

In “Living Fossils: Anatomies of Race and Reproduction in Modern Egypt,” Moore tells a very compelling story of modern medical science’s inextricable link to anti-Black racism, both in the West and in modern Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not doubt that Dr. Naguib Mahfouz, the celebrated Egyptian gynecologist, shared the racialized outlook typical of the Egyptian elite. Few of us escape being of our time and place. I become uneasy, however, when Moore suggests that he might have experimented callously on his Black African patients when he operated on them to cure urinary fistula. Moore bases this allegation on the higher rate of failure he reports of his early operations as opposed to his later ones. Moore does specify that the record yields no evidence that he operated without using anesthesia or that he used other reprehensible techniques. Through analogy with other medical/racialized abuses, Moore nevertheless speculates that he might have done so.

In her exchange with Hammerschlag, Moore says that to recover the voice of erased Black African women, we cannot wait for “the smoking gun,” suggesting that scholars need to go beyond what is in the archive to write about the past. I agree that the official records we have available to us as historians leave large swaths of reality out. By looking at histories of science/medicine in the context of the slave trade, Moore fills in at least some of these holes. But to accuse a particular person of heinous behavior, we do need the smoking gun. The fact that Mahfouz collected affected body parts extracted from his patients during operations for teaching purposes, even without asking for consent to display, does not mean that he wielded the knife on his patients in unconscionable ways. Even an Egyptian nationalist imbued with a sense of ethnic superiority could nonetheless have been a conscientious doctor. In the case of Mahfouz, Moore mentions that he saved many women’s lives—both through the surgeries he performed and through the gynecology clinics and child-welfare sections he founded in poor neighborhoods. Isn’t pointing out a simultaneity of possibilities—the both/and—crucial if we want to avoid a hegemonic explanatory model that threatens to erase the particularity of people?

I sympathize with Hammerschlag’s desire not to have our own narrative displace that of the thinker we interpret, fully aware that we cannot completely eradicate our desire for control and power. This explains her interest in Sarah Kofman, who, in Hammerschlag’s reading of her, was knowledgeable of this dynamic and made both disrupting and honoring the thinkers she interpreted central to her oeuvre. In the work of Hammerschlag, I detect an allergy to the concept of mastery over someone’s else thought, of course, but also over reality itself. That is why the citation from Derrida figures so prominently in her scholarship: As he says, “If I have to choose between the thing itself and the substitute, I’ll let go of the thing itself.” I hear in this quotation Borges’s fear of Tlön and the false pretensions of reason. We don’t have access to reality itself but only to an order of our own making, and we need at all points to be aware of that.

I wonder, though, whether we might not rescue the word “master” and a certain understanding of reality, given the world we live in. In our world, ChatGPT can give us an adequate summary of Borges’s story (or Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat) and maybe even a decent interpretation. But reality passes through our own confrontation with its myriad details: the authors tone, style, and humor, the thicket of possible meanings. In a world of AI duplication, should we not emphasize that everything of any importance depends on what passes between a master and a disciple? The defining trait of a master lies in an expression inexhaustible to any specific translation of it. Not all masters are on the library shelf, as Hammerschlag shows, but that does not take away the notion of master, in the sense of a teacher who knows something we could not know without them. Only from them do we get the sense that reality cannot be contained in our ideas once and for all, emerging only in an ever-changing relationship between people—both living and dead. Truth, reality, all those terms in our sources may have to come back in force, but in a form that necessarily emphasizes what passes between persons.

This is all to say that we live in a world in which science and religion are not only our objects of study but, as Hammerschlag and Moore show, categories that shape our modes of engagement as scholars. I would maintain that among the vexing problems bequeathed to us by colonialism is the one of secularism, in which we refuse to grant reality to claims of transcendence. Today, we are being confronted with claims of transcendence from the very science that has secularized us, and what it wants to transcend is the human. We need, if we are to preserve our humanity, insist on a transcendence that does not erase us. Perhaps, as Hammerschlag and Moore both point out, we scholars experience transcendence most directly when we interpret. We should not be shy in overcoming our allergy to the term.