| Sumario: | This article examines Jorge Luis Borges's critical appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche through a reading of "Funes el memorioso" (1942). I argue that Nietzsche, specifically his account of forgetting, is an important intertext in the story. Borges critiques Nietzsche's exaltation of forgetting, on philosophical and political grounds. The story sets up a dynamic whereby the narrator distorts Funes, whom Borges identifies with the Argentine past, specifically with a time prior to the genocidal Conquest of the Desert (1879–85). The narrator's distortion and praise of forgetfulness are ideologically significant, and Borges invites a connection to modes of distortion and repression operative in Nazism and Argentine nationalism. Against a critical consensus that, taking a page from the narrator, holds that Funes cannot think, I show, with recourse to Kant's idea of the intuitive understanding, that Funes does think, just not in a stereotypically human way. This reassessment of Funes's consciousness has important repercussions for the aesthetic debates this story has been enlisted in, which revolve around Borges's own relation to realism and modernism.
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