It also happened with María Zambrano. It's funny how the intelligentsia of any generation, mired in authoritarianism, ends up in exile as the only way to survive in its commitment to the critical vision that every society needs. Curious and enlightening about what remains at the controls of the government ...
But the moral resurgence of a country on the return of its illustrious exiles is also magical. As in our case they were Ramon J. Sender, Max Aub or own Maria Zambrano among many others.
In the case of María, 45 years had passed since that 1939 when the nightmare of the war ended to prolong itself in the delirium of the dictatorship ... Leaving your country as an imperative for a thinker and author like few could excel at that time in Europe, he supposed that multiplying uprooting of the creative in the philosophical and the poetic (with a balance between the depth of the lyrical and the prosaic that is seldom fathomed), as well as in the essayist and even in the political.
Between America and Europe, the brilliant Malaga-born author was composing a very brilliant and extensive bibliography where she alternated study and research, development of her philosophical thought but also that Hispanicism of whoever had to leave and who is still trying to define the reasons for a cainite war that ended with so many things ...
Top 3 recommended books by María Zambrano
Forest glades
Philosophy in María Zambrano is an awareness that goes from the sensory to the rational. No other thinker has been able to find in this ambivalence the best composition to encompass everything (which we can understand, of course). This book is the best example of the genius of the thinker convinced of the need for the lyrical, as the Greeks already did with their myths transcended over their own History.
Work from 1977 that is a whole philosophical-poetic monument, one of the fundamental books of the recent history of thought. In it, María Zambrano immerses the reader in a primal feeling, prior to all time, to which the fearsome Cronos has no access and where a lost paradise is recovered, a primordial vision.
It is in this non-place that Zambrano accesses so as not to feel exiled, exiled; it is in him where we can all recover an always longed for original unity. The Malaga thinker thus proposes an original regression in which philosophy, poetry, music and mysticism show us the way to remember "the Feeling", to rescue "things and beings from confusion."
The tomb of Antigone
That Greek culture already had something avant-garde, in terms of an underground powerful feminism from the mythological, is undeniable. Perhaps more in Sophocles than in Homer. From Cassandra to Antigone. Some of the most transcendent characters in this ancient mythological imaginary are those transforming women due to their intelligence or their gifts.
An unquestionable symbol of moral integrity and vital force, Antigone is one of the most discussed mythological figures in the history of thought. To her, María Zambrano wrote in 1948, "we cannot stop hearing her," because "Antígone's tomb is our own darkened conscience."
The thinker never abandoned her interest in this heroine, whose tragic story, told by Sophocles in the tragedy of the same name, encompasses numerous issues that Zambrano dealt with in depth throughout his intellectual career: the narrow border line between philosophy and literature, the social character and political freedom, the use and abuse of power, exile or the protagonism of the feminine.
The man and the divine
Appeared for the first time in 1955 and substantially enlarged in its 1973 reissue, «El hombre y lo divino», a key work in the development of the thought of María Zambrano (1904-1991), acts as a bridge between the most complete distillation of his first ideas and the articulation of that "poetic reason" that would unfold from then on in the bosom of his philosophical production.
Faced with a modernity plunged into the eternal game of renunciation and return to a divinity that he longs to get rid of but cannot renounce, Zambrano traces the paths for a new relationship with the divine that, following the footsteps of piety, can allow us to recover reality to reveal the liberating powers buried by that "history made idol" to which we have been doomed.
