aguillonmata's blog

(Written under the stress of this and this environment.)

A confession is commonly understood as a statement—either spontaneous or pursued by someone else’s interrogations—made to others about what only the speaker knows. For the Spanish thinker María Zambrano, though, a confession implies also something transcendental, easier to understand from her catholic background: a strict action of auto-analysis and self-criticism based on the idea of being each of us, eventually, mistaken. The confession is made de facto in front of an authority—a priest, a policeman, the public opinion—but, on top of that, it is made in front of oneself and to oneself. “Every time Philosophy re-writes its own history, it forgets with disdain what men owe to other kinds of knowledge that are born either close to it or far away from it”, says Zambrano.

So many people have said so many things in the last days against and in favor of secrets of state that it is really hard not to get lost between the words and the feelings that those words expose. And this is maybe one of the most frustrating realities of the debate: feelings are, instead of ideas, what determine the discussion, which could not be any worse. People from the spheres of political power—plus the military, the media and the most determinant group of the corporations—have reacted with embarrassment, which is understandable due to the nature of the secrets disclosed but unacceptable coming from institutions that carry such authority and therefore such responsibility. The embarrassment has turned into rage, a completely misguided idea of nationalism, abuse of power, and a sense of pride that in not so important circumstances would move us to spontaneous laughter.

Everything is interconnected. In some disciplines and particularly in hard sciences that is rather an obvious and therefore useless statement than a secret. But in the area I have been trained—literature, but I could use general terms like art or simply culture—the same obvious statement is often forgotten or decisively denied. The academic studies of culture and even sometimes the very products of high culture—poetry, philosophy, art—ignore, both purposely and accidentally, the connection between their abstractions and the riddle of power. Due to a good reason, though: the abstract thinking that rules high culture and the specificity of the academic studies of culture demand focusing. There is no room here for an extended explanation of this point, so I will be satisfied with the words copied from a letter of Maurice Blanchot, a radical writer of the kind that embraces its own isolation by creating a sort of exclusive language: “One [of the two impulses of a writer] is the passion, the realization, and the speech of the whole in dialectical accomplishment”, he says: the prosecution, the chase—that is what it is—of the whole.