When the Mirror Becomes a Prison: Adorno, Borges, and the Possibility of Reconciliation

Fauna of Mirrors, in the style of Magritte. AI image

 “Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Fauna of Mirrors”

1. Two Kingdoms Separated by the Mirror

In “Fauna of Mirrors,” from The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges describes two distinct worlds: the human world and the world behind the mirrors. Their inhabitants, colours, and forms were different, yet the two kingdoms lived in harmony. Mirrors provided passages between them, allowing their inhabitants to move from one world to the other without erasing their differences.

This arrangement does not last. One night, the mirror creatures invade the human world. After a bloody war, the Yellow Emperor defeats them, imprisons them behind the mirrors, and forces them to reproduce human actions and gestures. Their former freedom gives way to compulsory imitation. Yet Borges’s account does not end with their defeat: a day will come when the spell is broken and the creatures awaken.

The narrative raises a question that can be explored through Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy: Can different beings enter into a relationship without one having to become the reflection of the other? The question concerns more than the preservation of difference. It also concerns the possibility of a relationship in which difference does not become a reason for domination. Adorno’s concepts of identity and non-identity help us investigate this problem and approach his idea of reconciliation (Versöhnung).

2. The Limits of Identity

For Adorno, a central problem of thought lies in the tendency to identify objects with the concepts through which we understand them. Concepts are indispensable: thinking requires us to recognise, classify, and organise what we encounter by bringing particular things under general categories. Yet no concept entirely captures the object to which it refers. Something about the object always exceeds the conceptual determination through which it becomes intelligible.

The problem arises when thought forgets this limitation and treats conceptual identification as complete. Adorno calls this tendency identity thinking (Identitätsdenken). Under its influence, the particular is reduced to what a general concept allows us to recognise, while whatever does not fit its categories is neglected or excluded. As Adorno writes, “Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of nonidentity” (Negative Dialectics).

Non-identity (Nichtidentität) does not mean that objects cannot be identified or understood. It means that they are never simply identical to the concepts through which they are understood. The object retains a dimension that conceptual thought cannot fully assimilate. Dialectical thinking therefore requires an awareness of the difference between the object and the concept that seeks to comprehend it.

Adorno’s critique also has a social dimension, although conceptual identification and social domination are not simply the same process. The reduction of particularity to an established identity finds a counterpart in social arrangements that demand conformity to a prevailing model. What does not fit the standard is excluded, subordinated, or brought under control. This connection leads us to a broader question: how can difference exist within a relationship without being subjected to a single standard?

3. When the Mirror Becomes a Prison

Borges’s story gives this problem a narrative form through the transformation of the mirror. Initially, it separates two worlds while allowing movement between them. Their inhabitants remain different, but the boundary does not prevent them from crossing into one another’s domain. The mirror is both a limit and a passage.

After the war, however, its function changes. The Yellow Emperor imprisons the defeated creatures and forces them to imitate human beings. They become what Borges calls “mere slavish reflections”. What had allowed movement between different worlds now confines one of them and determines how its inhabitants are permitted to appear.

The earlier invasion complicates this transformation. The mirror creatures were not simply passive victims from the beginning: they had crossed into the human world as invaders. Borges does not explain their motives or tell us what brought the original harmony to an end. We should therefore avoid treating either kingdom as inherently innocent. What the story does make clear is that the human victory leads to a new asymmetry: the defeated creatures lose their freedom and are condemned to reproduce the image of their conquerors.

Read through Adorno’s critique of identity thinking, this transformation reveals how the imposition of a single model can become a form of domination. The problem is no longer simply that the two kingdoms are different or that they have come into conflict. It is that the victorious kingdom makes its own identity the measure of the other. The mirror no longer connects two worlds; it compels one of them to repeat the other.

4. Liberation Is Not Yet Reconciliation

The story does not end with the creatures’ imprisonment. Borges introduces the possibility of a gradual awakening. The Fish will be the first to stir, followed by the other inhabitants of the mirror world. As Borges writes, “Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us”.

The significance of this awakening lies in the recovery of a difference that had been suppressed. The mirror creatures begin to escape the identity imposed upon them and regain the possibility of existing beyond the image they have been forced to reproduce. Their liberation consists in ceasing to imitate their captors.

Yet Borges’s narrative introduces an important complication. The creatures will break through the barriers of glass or metal, “and this time will not be defeated.” The story anticipates another invasion and a battle in which the creatures of the water will also take part. Their awakening therefore does not promise a peaceful relationship between the two kingdoms. It announces the return of conflict, even if its outcome will be different.

This is where the distinction between liberation and reconciliation becomes important. Recovering autonomy may be necessary to overcome subordination, but it does not guarantee that the relationship between former opponents will change. The formerly subordinated may regain their freedom while remaining caught in the same logic of confrontation. The cycle of invasion, defeat, and retaliation may simply begin again.

Borges thus leaves us with a question that the creatures’ awakening cannot answer: how can the recovery of freedom lead to a relationship that no longer reproduces domination?

5. Reconciliation: Difference Without Domination

This question brings us to Adorno’s idea of reconciliation (Versöhnung). What would have to change for different beings to establish a relationship without domination? Adorno’s answer cannot be reduced either to the elimination of difference or to the peaceful separation of things that remain unrelated.

In “On Subject and Object,” Adorno considers what reconciliation might mean for the relationship between subject and object. It would be impossible, he writes, to conceive it either as an undifferentiated unity or as a hostile opposition. Rather, it would involve “the communication of what is differentiated.” He then adds: “Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other” (Critical Models, 247).

The first part of this formulation makes clear that reconciliation does not require differences to disappear. Differentiation without domination points towards a condition in which particularity no longer has to be sacrificed to an imposed identity. What is different can exist without being required to conform to a general standard or reproduce an established model.

But Adorno’s formulation also rules out the idea that reconciliation would consist simply in keeping different beings apart. Mere separation may prevent one side from imposing itself on the other, but it does not establish the communication Adorno has in mind. His emphasis on the differentiated “participating in each other” suggests a relationship in which each side can encounter what is different without assimilating it. The other is neither absorbed into one's own identity nor excluded as something entirely external. Reconciliation would thus make mutual participation possible without requiring sameness.

There is, however, a difficulty in describing such a condition too positively. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes that “the idea of reconcilement forbids the positive positing of reconcilement as a concept” (145). To establish in advance what a reconciled world must look like would risk projecting the categories of the present onto a possibility that would require their transformation. Reconciliation cannot therefore be presented as a finished model of social harmony. Its critical force lies in exposing the forms of domination that prevent such a relationship from emerging.

6. Beyond the Mirror

Borges’s story does not show us such a relationship. Its initial harmony gives way to invasion and war, the defeat of the mirror creatures leads to their subjection, and their awakening anticipates another battle. The narrative leaves open whether their return could lead to anything other than a repetition of the conflict.

Read alongside Adorno, the story makes visible the difference between recovering freedom and transforming the relationship between former opponents. The end of compulsory imitation would restore the mirror creatures’ autonomy, but it would not by itself resolve the conflict between the two kingdoms. The challenge is to move beyond a relationship in which one side determines the conditions under which the other can exist.

The comparison does not make Borges’s narrative an illustration of Adorno’s philosophy. Rather, the story gives narrative form to a problem that Adorno investigates conceptually: whether difference can exist within a relationship without becoming the object of domination. The changing function of the mirror makes this problem visible. What matters is not simply whether a boundary separates two worlds, but what kind of relationship takes place across it.

A different future would require more than breaking the mirror's spell; it would require transforming the relationship it represents. What would a world look like in which we no longer needed others to become reflections of ourselves?

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.

Adorno, Theodor W. “On Subject and Object.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford, 245–258. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Borges, Jorge Luis, with Margarita Guerrero. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Revised, enlarged and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author. London: Penguin Books, 1974.