This essay reads “Funes el memorioso”, Borges’s famous tale, not as a narrative about the workings of memory, and even less as the spectacle of an idiot savant, but rather as an epistemological testimony/experiment whose stages are a statement of principle, a hypothesis and its failure. The story, crossed by two vertical cuts, is the setting; and the discourse that tells the story the one that contitutes, by itself, the process of acquiring knowledge. The failure of the experiment/testimony opens the door to an alternative type of knowledge: the aesthetic one.