This presentation examines the tension between representation and abstraction through a comparative reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ The Mirror and the Mask and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu, refracted through Michel Serres’ philosophy of noise. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between knowledge and art—where imagination serves understanding in the former and understanding serves imagination in the latter—the talk proposes schemas as non-propositional structures of imagination that cannot be exhausted by propositional knowledge. By juxtaposing Borges’ triadic progression of poems with Balzac’s quest for the absolute masterpiece, the presentation traces a shared schema that moves from mimetic clarity to masked complexity and finally toward an unshareable singularity. In Borges, this culminates in a fatal revelation; in Balzac, in the unreadable chaos of Frenhofer’s painting. Serres’ reinterpretation shifts the focus from destruction to potential, framing the “masterpiece” not as representation but as ichnography: the noisy, formless source from which all forms emerge. Noise, masks, mirrors, and foam function as figures for infinity, fear, and becoming. Against classical expectations of representation, the third term in both fables marks a threshold where meaning dissolves into noise and autonomy provokes anxiety. The presentation argues that art’s most generative power lies not in absolute revelation but in masking—maintaining a fertile indeterminacy that allows works to survive, proliferate, and remain in continuous becoming.