When I first learned about the existence of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” I had just begun to digest the Adornian aesthetic. Honestly, I was thrilled by the idea that artistic objects could be shrouded in such mystery, always conceptually open and free from any definition — that objects were, in essence, “indefinable.” Mine was a long and complex process of understanding and assimilating the positions of Wittgenstein and Weitz, who denied the classification of art, which was only “synthetically” understandable through a never-explicable feeling. My process of understanding therefore suffered a setback when I came across the case raised by Borges. In his short story, the Argentine writer compares two works: the original "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes; and another story written by an imaginary author named Pierre Menard. Despite being two different works, the two texts are syntactically identical. As I thought about what could be the difference between the two, if in fact they were identical, I asked myself: “Why did Menard even rewrite the 'Quixote'?” Indeed, Borges’s expedient was excellent. After all, as early as 1939 he was using literature to test such concepts as originality, copy, translation, and contingency.
The answer to my question would come from Borges himself, who observes that the two texts differ in that they belong to different historical backgrounds that make them characteristic of their own time. Although Menard uses the same words in the same order as Cervantes, the difference is that he refers to the “land of Carmen” — which belongs to nineteenth-century literature and was probably influenced by Flaubert’s "Salammbô" — as an example of a historical novel. Contrarily, Cervantes describes the reality of "his own province" in an attempt to annihilate the chivalrous novel. Therefore, the main difference between the two resides in the manner of referring to places and times.
The timing must have been precise in order to set the stage for the events that would follow, for Borges’s work was not translated into English until 1962. Two years later, the American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto would first see Andy Warhol’s "Brillo Box" installation at Stable Gallery in New York. Confronting the issue of the "indiscernible", Danto rethinks the art object in Plato’s terms (imitative theory) and moves beyond the dominating aesthetic — precisely the one I was assimilating when I came across the case of Menard/Cervantes — and theorizes a philosophy of art that necessarily has to reconceive the object starting with its ontological nature. The indiscernible could not be confined to a merely perceptual nature. It even went beyond the formal differences between Warhol’s "Brillo Box" and the supermarket version designed by James Harvey. The point was that such differences were no longer only confined to figurative art. Again, credit goes to Borges, who dealt with this dilemma outside the realm of art, and, even before that, to Marcel Duchamp, who signed a urinal “R. Mutt,” not to apologize for the ordinary but to explore the boundaries of art.
In the case of Menard/Cervantes, Danto distinguishes the concept of the “copy” from that of “appropriation.” The copy is what replaces the original, inheriting its structure and its relationship to the world. The appropriation, on the other hand, despite lacking some features of what it replaces, displays something that has such features. Moreover, the appropriation has a semantic structure and does not merely display the original in quotes. It has its own identity, which resides in the subtle matter of exactness: not being the result of an attempt to copy, the quotation develops its own meaning.