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This essay dialogues with Jacques Rancière’s On the Shores of Politics and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “El Congreso”. Though employing different genres, Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Rancière discuss a series of common themes: political community, equality and the role that intelligence (for Rancière) and literary fiction (for Borges) play in imagining the contours of possibility of a “community of equals” of an unfixed definition. I argue that according to both thinkers, fiction and political essays create the space for the discursive exposition of such a community as one always imminently to come, or as always already a catachresis. Discursively situating the “community of equals” is a practice of artifice that is constituted in the community’s ability and need to enact it.