ABSTRACT
Jorge Luis Borges’s fantastic compendium, in contrast, gestures to “the stark impossibility of thinking that”. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. In the 1967 edition of Imaginary Beings, Borges invites “the eventual reader in Columbia or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate description, and most conspicuous traits of local monsters”. Black feminism and black thought as always already trans have troubled the categories of binary gender and of medically assigned sex for their historical and contemporary violences. A specter haunts Jacques Derrida’s seminars on the beast and the sovereign – the specter of blackness.
