ABSTRACT
Even though their positions appear to be very divergent, there is a place where Jorge Luis Borges and Lacan meet; it is situated at the level of poetry. Their point of convergence is in poetry’s capacity to focus on what language is. In order to approach this, this chapter shows how Borges’s poetry illuminates the new perspective that Lacan introduces into psychoanalysis, one that involves time. When Lacan conceives full speech as what fills the space between empty speech and the desire of the subject, he concludes that there is a failure of sense and of signification, and that they are excluded from speech. Lacan values the function of poetry at the level of this gap for it illustrates the possibility of the subject acceding to a satisfaction other than that produced by speech, for speech is the satisfaction of blah-blah. Time remains a problem without solution for Borges because it is not possible to catch it: time flows, flees.
