Courteous Love: Love scenes holding worlds. Case Borges.

Abstract

Why speak about courteous love at the beginning of 21st century? Why Borges, a 20th century writer, should be registered as one of its representatives?
This work, invoking literature applied to psychoanalysis, will try to give answers to such questions. To this end, it will draw on two essential authors: Zizek (2003) who holds that "the logic of courteous love keeps defining the parameters within which the two genders relate to each other". Lacan (1990), for his part, acknowledges that "the influence of such poetry is decisive for us" despite the centuries passed by. Indeed, its "traces" still remain in the configuration of the current couple and, we add, in all the post-Boom Latin American sentimental narrative.
Thus, from the poetics of fiction, the courteous love features arise such as anamorphosis and emptiness; simulation and artifice; opacity, the indecipherable, darkness, secret, and death. Work does not refer to the real, it is self-referential, it has in itself the deciphering keys; so entering itself into the code, into its meaningful dimension.
Borges’ poems from 1923 up to 1985 will be used as examples of these formulations.