Printed book

2019

Journal of Education Culture and Society

The subject of this presentation is an attempt to understand the concept of exile in terms of the works of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, a woman who left her country after the Spanish civil war and lived the life of an exile. This work focuses on the difficulties enco-untered by thinkers when they try to reflect on the experience of exile, and it aims to bring Zambrano’s thought on exile closer to her main philosophical concepts.

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

The rhetoric of nomadism used by Tomás Segovia (Spain, 1927-Mexico, 2011) renders his exilic poetry suggestively paradoxical: the poetic “I” aims to become exiled from exile. Segovia saw himself as marginal and without a homeland long before the exile brought about by the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Mexico in 1940, and from 1976 until his death, lived between Spain and Mexico. He is considered a prominent representative of the Spanish Republican exile on both sides of the Atlantic, a characterization that the writer rejected. In light of the socio-historical circumstances that defined the Spanish Republican exile in Mexico, this essay interrogates the ethico-political sense in which the condition of exile can be read in Segovia’s poetry. Thus it critiques the sometimes reductive contextual reading favored within political institutions. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitan ethics as an ethics that addresses the challenge of harmonizing universality and particularity, I read Segovia’s poetry as pointing toward a universal horizon that derives from a difference that Segovia could not entirely shed.

Zambrano is well-known for her critique of the ideal subject, as well as of philosophy and ‘Western’ reason. Despite this critique, notions like the individual and reason in her works has not been thoroughly analysed. Enquist Källgren argues that Zambrano’s texts contains a comprehensive theory of subjectivity. It is shown that Zambrano’s notion of subjectivity presupposes a structure that positions the human being in a modal relation to her surroundings. The human being can be conceived of as a structure of transcendent and transcendental positions in which the individual is the product of an expressive performativity. Zambrano’s theory of subjectivity can be read as an engagement with the thinking of both Aristotle and Kant, placing subjectivity in the tension between embodiment and transcendental capacities. It is concluded that Zambrano’s theory of subjectivity is in fact a modal ontology describing the condition of possibility of human existence. In addition, it is concluded that this modal ontology has important ethical implications since it presupposes the presence of an ‘other’ towards which expressive performativity is directed.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, 2022

History of European Ideas, 2018

This study analyses the political thinking of the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904– 1991). By focusing on the notions persona and individuo it argues that Zambrano's entire thought must be interpreted in the light of the ethical ontology present in her political writings. The study contextualizes Zambrano's political writings and shows that the circumstances of Zambrano's exile can explain why she opted for a discussion on politics that emphasizes personal responsibility rather than the political organization of society. The study further shows that it is as ethical ontology that her thinking has influenced later thinkers, and in particular the political and philosophical discussion in Italy. The Spanish philosopher María Zambrano is one of those thinkers about whom one can say that her works encompass the better part of the historical changes of the twentieth century.

One of the most appealing aspects of comparative literature is its capacity to accommodate the undecided. Those who love scholarship but hesitate in their intellectual endeavors between different forms of art, national literatures, or disciplines, are welcome in the field of comparativism. And certainly some of the undecided are those who oscillate between the areas of philosophical and literary inquiry. A particularly meaningful declaration of unconditional affection to both philosophy and literature is found in Martha Nussbaum's Love's :

Heidegger in the Literary World. Variations on Poetic Thinking Edited by Florian Grosser and Nassima Sahraoui, 2021

By focusing on the works of one of the most outstanding figures of Latinamerican literary world in the 20th century, the Cuban author José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), the article seeks to spell out some unexpected echoes of Martin Heidegger overseas. In a dialog traversed also by other voices (Blanchot, Benjamin, Kierkegaard, Schelling and W. Hamacher), the article approaches the enigmatic ontological status of the "image" that underlies Lezama Lima´s unique experience of language, by gathering some of the aletheic gestures that can be found in his poems, essays and two novels (Paradiso and Oppiano Licario). Thus, it revisits a series of motifs: "being-toward-resurrection", "readability", "poetic resistance", "gnostic space" (and the para-temporalities of the ‘súbito’ and the ‘wait’); the potens of the image as "germ-act" and its (aporroic) kinship with Schelling's "reductio ad essentiam" and Benjamin's "historical apocatástasis"; "hipertelia" and historical image. To what extent does Heidegger's thinking virtually encounter there, in Lezama Lima's poetics of the image, the challenge of a still unheard-of "tropology of being"?