[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i’ve no idea about moore, cheeto seems to be our resident expert on the man.

besides, it’s not an either-or thing. you can be borgesian and leftist because borgesian usually does not refer to a political position but more of a stylistical/structural thing at the core of the fiction itself, having to do with realities as structured by philosophical or mathematical ideas.

e.g., we take the self as a reality, but what if the self is a fiction and “the other” is “the same” (entity). or, what if we had a concrete visual or physical experience of the abstract concept of “infinite.” and so forth.

in the case of moore it has to do with metafictions— fictional documentations to support a fictional world, added as footnotes or commentary or some other form that’s presumably “outside” the story. this is actually as old as don quixote! at least, because 1) don quixote is supposed to be a translation from arabic, and cervantes likes to refer to the “original” author here and there, and 2) in volume 2 don quixote reads his own book telling of his adventures. but whatver cervantes did borges stole it well and turned it into a real 20th-century art form that made you dizzy with unreality vertigo, and spawned all manner of imitators, from highbrow shit to comic books.

anyway what i meant by 3rd world readings of superheros is that traditionally the latin-american right has been installed by/ supported by/aligned with the USA post-Monroe Doctrine, and so it has no problem integrating into the empire. the “left” in this scheme has been either nationalist or marxist or both, and in either case is the one that sees the US as an adversary, hence it’s the one that criticizes superman and hollywood and so forth while the other side eats it up.

moore being presumably a well-read person would have come in contact not just with 3rd world critics of north-american ideology, but also with 3rd world right wingers like borges who famously congratulated pinochet on his communist extermination campaign (no joke, it’s true.)

what i meant previously was that just because the thirld world is poor/oppressed/whatever it does not follow that it is a political monoblock. not every latin-amrican is a zapatista/che guevara/whatever, and borges himself was an anglophile and europhile who asked to be buried in switzerland— howver, when i say “3rd world critiques of american superheroes” it’s implied they’re 99% “leftist”.

Fuck man, this is some interesting shit. I don’t have time to reply right now but I don’t want to forget that we talked about this. I find it illuminating, and also somewhat terrifying as it reminds me how small and incomplete my understanding of the “third-world” realities is.