María Zambrano: A Life of Poetic Reason and Political Commitment

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

María Zambrano

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

David Frier (University of Leeds)

Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Rob Stone (University of Birmingham)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Jo Labanyi (New York University)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

María Zambrano

A Life of Poetic Reason and Political Commitment

BEATRIZ CABALLERO RODRÍGUEZ

© Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781783169757

e-ISBN 9781783169771

The right of Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: María Zambrano in 1988. Photograph reproduced courtesy of Fundacíon Maríía Zambrano.

A mi padrino, que me enseñó a preguntar por qué.

María Zambrano at the University of Madrid, around 1928. Reproduced courtesy of Fundacíon María Zambrano.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Context and Influences

Chapter 3: Biography and Politics

Chapter 4: Exile and Zambrano’s Political Philosophy

Chapter 5: Zambrano in (re-)construction

Chapter 6: Zambrano’s relationship with language

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Alexis Grohmann, Andrew Ginger and Francis Lough for their support and guidance. I am thankful to the commissioning editor, Sarah Lewis, for believing in this manuscript from the beginning and for all her patience throughout the process.

I am immensely grateful to Linda Silvester and to Fran Villalba and their firm Stilogo for their translations of Zambrano’s quotations into English. I also wish to express my gratitude to the University of Strathclyde and my colleagues, whose help has been inestimable.

Finally, I would also like to thank my partner, my family and very specially Antonio Lozano Ortiz, whose insistence and continued support have ensured the completion of this manuscript.

Chapter 1

Introduction

María Zambrano (1904–91) is widely regarded as one of the most original Spanish thinkers of the twentieth century. Her biggest contribution to intellectual history is, without doubt, her poetic reason; that is, her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Spanish republican thinker has only been acknowledged in recent decades. Nevertheless, a certain aura of mysticism shrouds her writings. Here, I contend that, although the presence of a spiritual component is undeniable, her thought is far from mystical or unapproachable, as it is frequently believed to be. Instead, what Zambrano does is to propose an alternative reason – razón poética – by means of which she links the personal to the political so that the path of self-development becomes the path for civic and political engagement and fulfilment. Thus, this monograph argues that the scope of her intellectual contribution should not be limited to her impact on philosophy, the field with which her work is most closely associated. Beyond that, poetic reason also has extensive political ramifications which need to be addressed. That is why I consider this effort to re-assess the political dimension of her work necessary and long overdue. More broadly, this monograph may be understood as part of a wider effort to re-evaluate and understand the work of Spanish exiles after the Spanish Civil War.

The central argument of this monograph is that Zambrano’s thought is driven by a core pedagogical and political project. Whereas the political content of some of her early writings, as well as her engagement with the republic’s cause prior to and during the Spanish Civil War, are all well known, the political component of her thought after this period has passed largely unnoticed. Thus, the purpose of this book is to reveal the political dimension that is inherent to Zambrano’s poetic reason. To this end, it reframes Zambrano’s poetic reason in the light of her biographical choices and, finally, it examines the ontological and epistemological assumptions which underpin her poetic reason.

In common with other Spanish and European thinkers such as Unamuno, Ortega, Levinas, Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the members of the Frankfurt School, Zambrano elaborates a sharp criticism against the dominance of discursive reason.¹ The term discursive comes from the Greek diánoia and it refers to the kind of reason which, based on the principle of causality, conceives the acquisition of knowledge only through inference; that is to say that its epistemology rests on the inference of new knowledge from pre-existing premises. The cornerstones of this discursive reason include Aristotelian logic, Cartesian reason and post-Kantian morality. In line with this, the enthronement of reason brought about by the Enlightenment represents the cusp of discursive reason.

In contrast, Zambrano’s thought constitutes an idiosyncratic and distinctive critique of the dominant paradigms of this kind of rationality, which she sometimes refers to simply as Western reason, of which she is insistently critical. This critique can already be observed in her first published book, Horizonte del liberalismo (1930),² and it becomes one of the common threads throughout her work, present in publications of a very different nature, such as Filosofía y poesía (1939), La agonía de Europa (1945), El hombre y lo divino (1955), Persona y democracia (1958) and La tumba de Antígona (1967), to name but a few. In fact, her oeuvre as a whole can be described as a reaction against and a search for an alternative to this type of reason, which she deems not simply as insufficient, but – more pressingly – as absolutist and tyrannical.

Beyond her critique, Zambrano’s writings also have an important constructive element: she proposes an alternative rationality based on an experiential epistemology and on a wider understanding of what reason is. As discussed in detail in chapter 6, poetic reason constitutes a destabilizing alternative in as far as it integrates elements traditionally banished from the confines of rationality, such as spirituality and intuition, but also because it reclaims the value of elements considered contrary to reason, such as delirium. Consequently, as Mercedes Gómez Blesa puts it, Zambrano’s thought constitutes ‘una de las reflexiones más radicales sobre el logos filosófico de nuestra tradición’.³ Not only that, her wider reason originates from and contains a profound political concern whose implications need to be addressed.

Availability and acknowledgement of Zambrano’s work

Zambrano was a diverse and prolific writer. Although she mostly wrote essays, her works encompass many genres, including newspaper articles, autobiography, novel, confession, theatre and the cultivation of an idiosyncratic genre closely linked to her poetic reason: delirium, whose implications are discussed in chapters 4 and 6.

Her first publication was a small article for her school journal in 1914. The article, however, met with the disapproval of her father and she would not publish again until over a decade later. In 1928, she started publishing for several newspapers, even having her own weekly column in the republican newspaper El Liberal. By then, as we shall see in chapter 3, she was an integral part of several of Madrid’s intellectual and artistic circles. Henceforth, she contributed to various newspapers and journals, including the prestigious Revista de Occidente, funded by her professor, the charismatic José Ortega y Gasset. She published her first book, Horizonte del liberalismo, in 1930. She continued to write and publish abundantly, even during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, her next book, Antología de Federico García Lorca, was published in 1936, the year the war broke out.

Although after her exile the mechanisms of censorship of the Franco regime did not affect her writing, other more subtle mechanisms of cultural hegemony and her own personal circumstances did limit not so much her production as her publication. This can be observed in the distance which sometimes separates her manuscripts from their publication, an example of this is Delirio y destino, which despite having been written in the early 1950s was not published for the first time until 1989. On the other hand, as a result of her status as an exile, access to her work and to that of other republican exiles was difficult for those who stayed within Spain, as often their publications were met with suspicion and, in most cases, were not readily available. Dialogue with the republican exiles was not initiated until 1953, with the publication of José Luis López Aranguren’s ‘La evolución espiritual de los intelectuales españoles en la emigración’; however, this call for greater communication between the Spaniards who remained in Spain and those who Aranguren euphemistically called emigrants was more symbolic than effective and there continued to be little interest and access to the publications of exiled writers, which in many cases – including Zambrano’s – remained largely unknown until a much later date.

Although her publications may seem fragmentary, disperse and sometimes elusive, reflecting the element of instability present almost throughout her life, Zambrano kept on writing and – later as her health deteriorated with age – dictating almost until her death. Her last text published in life was a newspaper article in Diario 16: ‘Los peligros de la paz’, written in 1990, just six months before she passed away. In addition to her work, Zambrano also wrote numerous letters to her family – her sister Araceli – romantic partners – Gregorio del Campo – and friends – José Bergamín, José Lezama Lima, Agustín Andreu, José Ángel Valente – to name but a few of her interlocutors. Given her extensive production, a considerable amount of text was published posthumously and some of it still remains unpublished.

Despite her numerous publications and the originality of her thought, Zambrano’s work was largely overlooked for decades. In Aranguren’s opinion, the main factors which account for this are her being a heterodox disciple of Ortega, her exile and her not having held a chair in a university.⁴ Her gender, however, should also be added to this list, as there is every likelihood that her being a woman would have contributed decisively to this situation. In any event, the first scholar to highlight Zambrano’s importance as an author was the French Hispanist Alain Guy, who in 1956 published Les Philosophes espagnols d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. But it was not until 1981, when she was awarded the Premio Príncipe de Asturias, that public attention was drawn to Zambrano’s work and worth. Several other honours and accolades followed, including the award of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de Málaga in 1983 and the Premio Cervantes in 1988.

In an effort to preserve and promote her thought and legacy, in 1987 the Fundación María Zambrano was established. As a result of the Fundación’s work, her manuscripts and letters are being preserved and made available to researchers, and some previously unpublished material has been published posthumously. This distance between the time of writing and the time of publication bears testimony to the complexities of her life and work, and it should be taken into account when approaching her publications, for it constitutes yet one more challenge in the task of establishing and understanding the structure and progression of her thought.

Since the first institutional acknowledgement of her intellectual contribution in 1981, her work and life story have sparked popular and scholarly interest, particularly so during the last decade, since the celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth in 2004. This was made to coincide with the release of María querida, a film directed by José Luis García Sánchez, which – with some artistic licence – gives the public a glimpse of Zambrano’s life upon her return to Spain and conveys the core of her philosophy. This is also reflected in the commemoration of her thought through the naming of various public spaces and institutions, such as a parks, train stations, and various schools and colleagues.

This renewed interest in Zambrano has also resulted in an extensive number of publications, which include the proliferation of monographs, scholarly articles and doctoral theses analysing different aspects of her thought.⁵ In spite of this recent popularity, little has been done to unravel and explore the political content of her thought beyond her early work.

Today’s availability of Zambrano’s work continues to increase with the scholarly re-editions of some of her most emblematic texts, such as Claros del Bosque (2011), edited by Gómez Blesa, and La tumba de Antígona; Y otros textos sobre el personaje trágico (2012), edited by Virginia Trueba Mira. The contemporary reader may also gain further insight from the publication of several epistolary collections, such as her very personal letters to Gregorio del Campo – her first fiancé whom she would never marry – but also her correspondence with her friends José Bergamín, José Lezama Lima, Alfonso Reyes and Agustín Andreu, to mention but a few. Most crucial of all to the dissemination of her work is the publication – directed and edited by Jesús Moreno Sanz – of a critical edition of her complete works, which includes numerous previously unpublished manuscripts.⁶

In addition to this, many of Zambrano’s books have been translated into multiple languages, most prolifically, French, Italian and Portuguese, but also into non-romance languages such as German and Arab. However, only one of her books, Delirio y destino, has been fully translated into English.⁷ This suggests that, despite the fact that Zambrano tackles many of the issues which became central concerns to post-war European thinkers, her work is still largely unknown to anglophone readers. Thus, one of the aims of this book is to contribute to a further dissemination of her thought to an English-speaking audience.

Literature review

Amongst the wealth of publications devoted to Zambrano’s thought, those focused on the analysis of her political engagement are of particular relevance to this research. The first and probably most comprehensive analysis of Zambrano’s political thought is offered by Moreno Sanz in his lengthy introductory study to Morata’s 1996 edition of Horizonte del liberalismo – Zambrano’s first book and, arguably, her most overtly political one. Here, Moreno Sanz provides an erudite contextualization and analysis of Zambrano’s political activities and ideas during the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, he traces a genealogy of Zambrano’s political development and compiles Zambrano’s intellectual biography during the years leading up to the Second Republic. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in Zambrano’s early political thought, two elements in particular set Moreno Sanz’s research apart from other explorations of this topic.

First, although Ortega’s influence on her disciple, Zambrano, is well known, Moreno Sanz’s historiographic analysis reveals the lesser-known influence that Zambrano had on Ortega.⁸ This is particularly significant in matters of politics, given Zambrano’s repeated attempts to coax Ortega to take an active part in the defence of the republic.⁹ Moreno Sanz’s deep analysis of three pivotal letters that Zambrano sent Ortega to this effect demonstrates the impact that the heterodox disciple had on the professor, while also giving us an insight into the prefiguration of Zambrano’s political thought.¹⁰

Secondly, Moreno Sanz underlies the presence of Zambrano’s political works throughout her life, running parallel to her other publications.¹¹ He puts forward a brief, but compelling argument where he contends that from 1930 to 1965, those of her publications with a more political content serve as an impulse and foreshadow her other books. According to Moreno Sanz, ever since the publication of La tumba de Antígona in 1965 this pattern changes in that there is an element of political critique to all her subsequent writings. Moreno Sanz offers a coherent argument and a glimpse of the presence and influence of the political sphere in Zambrano’s thought as a whole. However, further research is still required to elucidate the political component of Zambrano’s mature work and how it relates to the rest of her thought.

Ana Bundgård’s research constitutes one of the most salient efforts to examine Zambrano’s early political thought. Her publications on this subject include an article entitled ‘El liberalismo espiritual de María Zambrano: Horizonte del liberalismo’ (2005) and a monograph under the title Un compromiso apasionado. María Zambrano: Un intelectual al servicio del pueblo, (1928–1939) (2009). The article, written in reference to Horizonte del liberalismo (1930), pinpoints and analyses the author’s positions with regards to politics in general and liberalism in particular. Here, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 3, Bundgård convincingly puts forward the argument that Zambrano’s approach to politics during the 1930s was an emotional one, based on her critique of rationalism and of the old liberalism which it engendered; and concludes that the new liberalism Zambrano was proposing was essentially a spiritual one. In Un compromiso apasionado, Bundgård expands her analysis of Zambrano’s early political engagement. In this monograph, Bundgård provides a socio-cultural and historical contextualization of Zambrano’s formative years, so as to explore the origins and development of Zambrano’s political commitment from 1928 till 1939. Here, Bundgård offers an in-depth examination of key texts written during this period, while deepening her analysis of the tension between Zambrano’s political and philosophical-spiritual callings. It is at this juncture between the two, in an effort to bridge this gap, that – according to Bundgård – poetic reason germinated.

Bundgård’s assessment of Zambrano’s early political thought also includes a critique. Bundgård questions Zambrano’s use of her ‘armed reason’ during the Spanish Civil War and indicates that her republican bias led her to adopt a Manichean view which prevented her from satisfactorily identifying the roots of the conflict between the two Spains.¹² As Bundgård explains, Zambrano often described the national side simply as fascists; however, Zambrano’s understanding of fascism was flawed. Zambrano failed to coherently define classical fascism and therefore to explain why some European countries became fascist and some others did not. For Bundgård, the reason for this is that Zambrano described fascism in psychological and, even, biological terms; she did not engage in an analysis of fascism at the economic, ideological and political levels (pp. 267–9). In short, Bundgård reveals Zambrano’s early approach to politics to be ultimately systematic, impassioned, militant and, even, partial. On the other hand, Bundgård nuances this assessment by adding that during this period Zambrano achieved the compromise that she was seeking between thought and political engagement and that, however misguided her value judgement may have been, Zambrano was embarked in an honest search for truth (pp. 270–1). Bundgård’s monograph constitutes a thorough and well-balanced assessment of Zambrano’s political thought and engagement during the years 1928–39. However, Zambrano’s search for truth and political engagement did not end with the civil war, which is why further research is needed to gain an understanding of Zambrano’s political positions after this period.

There are also several other articles exploring specific aspects of Zambrano’s early political contribution, most notably ‘Una lectura marxista de la obra de María Zambrano’ (1991) by Monique Dorang and ‘María Zambrano en la guerra civil’ (1991) by Laureano Robles Carcedo. Some doctoral theses are also devoted to the political aspect of Zambrano’s thought, which again focus on her early writings, most notably ‘El pensamiento político y social de María Zambrano’ (1994) by Ana I. Salguero Robles and ‘María Zambrano: Política e Historia’ (1997) by Lázaro Paniagua. What the above publications and theses have in common is that they focus on Zambrano’s early and most overtly political work. In fact, some scholars consider that Zambrano no longer engages in politics after the fall of the republic and the beginning of her long exile. Mari Paz Balibrea exemplifies this position. She explains this shift as follows: ‘In exile, Zambrano will transform her politics in existential and metaphysical uprooting, with elements of mysticism. It is undeniable that this position entails an abandonment of politics and a flight from philosophy.’¹³

Others scholars consider that, although her interest in politics dwindled after 1939, Zambrano still wrote some political books after the civil war, such as Persona y democracia. Thus, there are also some articles and book chapters that offer a glimpse into some aspects of the socio-political sphere of Zambrano’s thought beyond 1939. Amongst these, the following stand out for their understanding of the presence of an overarching political in Zambrano’s thought: José Ignacio Equizábal’s ‘Filosofía y Carnaval. El pensamiento político de M. Zambrano’ (2002); Pedro Cerezo’s ‘De la historia trágica a la historia ética’ (1991); Rogelio Blanco Matías’s ‘Presencia y compromiso de una intelectual’ (1991); and Juan Fernando Ortega Muñoz’s ‘María Zambrano: Un pensador comprometido’ (1994). These publications point to the presence of a lasting political compromise running through Zambrano’s philosophical production; however, their political analysis is hardly developed beyond Persona y democracia. Works like El hombre y lo divino and Claros del bosque (1977) are often taken to signal a more spiritual, even, mystical stage in her thought; a shift that, according to Ortega Muñoz, is even more marked after her return to Spain in 1984.¹⁴ Others, like Moreno Sanz and José Luis Abellán, go further. As we have seen above, Moreno Sanz briefly but strongly argues that Zambrano’s political interest and work has continued throughout her life, even considering politics almost as a structuring element in her thought, as for him, her overtly political works ‘marcan e inducen esencialmente los ritmos del pensar zambraniano y de los giros en que se resuelven sus distintas etapas’.¹⁵ Similarly, in his María Zambrano: Una pensadora de nuestro tiempo, Abellán devotes a chapter to arguing that Zambrano’s poetic reason is intrinsically linked to the social and political realms.¹⁶

What becomes clear from these diverse positions is that more research is needed to clarify Zambrano’s stand with regards to politics after 1939. Consequently, the purpose of this monograph is to undertake an integrating and more comprehensive study of Zambrano’s political thought. With this aim, first, I explore Zambrano’s early biography and publications to assess whether a political project ever existed. Then, in light of this, I re-assess Zambrano’s thought post-1939 with a view to elucidating the nature and the extent of the presence of politics in her work.

Methodology

One of the first challenges which must be faced when approaching Zambrano’s thought is that it is largely resistant to analysis. Poetic reason, precisely because it constitutes a rationality other than the established patterns of discursive reason, guards itself against the violence of systematic analysis. This is what led José Luis Mora García to affirm that traditional philosophy is ill-equipped in terms of language and methods to analyse Zambrano’s thought.¹⁷ Similarly, the fact that meaning, in Zambrano’s discourse, is not flat, but it is conveyed in layers instead, implies that the use of either the hermeneutic or the contextual approach – the two traditional approaches within the history of ideas – would be insufficient. Francis Lough echoes this concern