1.Borges often refers—directly or indirectly—to what he calls the aesthetic event in various texts across his career, both fictional and essayistic. I’ll mention just two. In "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" (Fictions), he notes that the aesthetic event "cannot do without some element of astonishment" and that "to be astonished from memory is difficult.” Later, in "The Wall and the Books" (Other Inquisitions), he writes:

"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or said something that we should have not lost, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not occur, is, perhaps, the aesthetic event."

 

I want to focus on two aspects of these intentionally open-ended descriptions:

First, the cause: the aesthetic event depends on astonishment and a break from memory—astonishment requires novelty.

Second, the effect: it produces a sense of imminent revelation—something that never fully arrives or that is already lost.

Borges includes a range of reasons for the aesthetic event: natural phenomena ("twilights," "places," "faces shaped by time"), cultural artifacts (“music," "mythology," “literature”), and intense subjective experiences ("states of happiness"). All of which point to heterogeneous forms of expression. 

The aesthetic event, then, is a moment of astonishment, sparked by something natural, created, or intensely felt, that disrupts memory and hints at a meaning that cannot be fully articulated. It suggests a presence or message that remains beyond the symbolic, and that disrupts it—an enigmatic signifier, in Jean Laplanche’s terms. It seduces us into thinking about it, even though we can only approach it indirectly.

2. Psychoanalysis produces aesthetic events that are what Christopher Bollas calls transformational objects, which produce unexpected psychic changes: the New. This is one way of thinking about an aesthetic unconscious that is a subverter of established meanings, narratives, and experiences. In this sense, the aesthetic unconscious is political. 

May 30th, 2025