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Al-Zahir

The Zahir in Jorge Luis Borges’ story is an object by which men become obsessed and are no more able to see anything beyond it. The mystery: why does the Zahir has this attractor power? Borges questions himself the reason why Tennyson said that if we could understand one single flower, we could understand what the world is. “Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects.” And then the Zahir would also have this potency of revealing the nature of being and existence. I conciliate Deleuze’s object’s ontology and Flusser’s concept of virtuality with aspects of the Sufi philosophy in order to investigate how a single object manifests itself, what are its potencies of existence beyond the real and the relations this object maintains with other systems to comprehend the whole through it.

Al-Zahir (PDF 334.91 KB)

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