When María Zambrano (1904–1991) returned to Spain from exile , in 1984, just shortly after the reinstatement of the Spanish democracy, she was hailed as the last survivor of the exiles of 1939 (“Con el retorno”, 1984). Being the well-known author and philosopher that she was—two years later, in 1986, she would be awarded the prestigious literary prize Premio Cervantes—her return came to signify a democratic inheritance that had been living in the shadows during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. As the last exile , Zambrano’s return worked as a symbol, connecting the fighters who defended the democratic Second Republic (1930–1939) and its values, with the new Spanish democratic government of the 1980s. Zambrano’s symbolic value as “the last exile” strengthened the process of political transition and she was referred to as “the mother of Spanish democracy”, connecting the new and frail political order with a democratic past. As a consequence, her writings are commonly interpreted in relation to her political commitments in Spain during the Civil War similarly connecting her thinking with a reconstructed Spanish democratic tradition of thought (Marqués 2001).
But Zambrano’s return to Spain was conditioned by having spent the previous forty-five years in exile , in both Latin America and Europe (1939–1984), and the better part of her literary production was conceived in exile . María Zambrano was born in 1904, the daughter of two schoolteachers influenced by the Spanish Free Institution of Education (Institución Libre de Enseñanza) (Jimenez García 2002).1 Under the guidance of her liberal father, she was educated as an intellectual in a society that was still dominated by traditional Catholic views on a woman’s position. Her possibility to study and take part in politics can be seen as a sign of the changing times however. In the student- and intellectual milieus in Madrid, where Zambrano arrived in the mid-1920s, there was a growing room for women to be active parts in both politics and university life. In this milieu—which included such prominent names as the vanguardista artists Luís Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Maruja Mallo , and the poets Concha Méndez, José Bergamín, Federico García Lorca and Miguel Hernández, Zambrano made a name for herself as the most promising disciple of the philosopher and politician José Ortega y Gasset , as well as close friends with the young cleric and philosopher Xavier Zubiri .
Together with Ortega , Zambrano was publicly and vehemently engaged in promoting and subsequently defending the Spanish Republic (1930–1936). She married the Spanish historian Alfonso Rodríguez Aldave in 1936 (he too one of Ortega’s less familiar disciples), who for a short period worked as the Republican diplomat in Chile. At the outbreak of the Civil War, both he and Zambrano returned to Spain. During the Civil War (1936–1939), she held a role as director of propaganda and displaced children, and left Spain only when the last Republican territory—Barcelona—fell, in late January 1939. While it is clear that the exile constituted a complete rupture with the life as an academic that she had initially envisioned (not the least because she never gained a new nationality), she was one of the privileged intellectuals who were helped by a network of fellow intellectuals in Europe (Italy and France) as well as Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico). And while exile certainly did not stop her from writing, it did mean a complete rupture in her marriage as the couple were unable to work and live in the same place. Exile is one of the major themes of Zambrano’s philosophical writings, recurring as a figure to describe a fundamental human condition. In a manuscript from 1935, narrating the experience of being caught in a thunderstorm which here symbolizes the political turmoil in Spain, she connects the concept of infinity with that of being un-earthed (desterrado) or in exile (Zambrano 2014a, 231). And, reflecting on exile upon her return forty-nine years later, she concludes that exile is an essential dimension of human life, and that she “could not conceive of my life without the exile that I have lived. Exile has been my homeland (patria), or like a dimension of an unknown homeland that once known cannot be renounced (Zambrano 2014a, 777)”.2 As some of her fellow exiles returned to Spain during the later and more lenient years of the regime, Zambrano who was intent on not returning until Franco was dead, conceived of returning as giving up on the values that the Second Republic embodied. For her, the exile had been the memory of a Spain that was truer than the one under Franco’s dictatorship, mixed up with a feeling of remorse or shame for not having shared the destiny with those who stayed on (Zambrano 2014a, 744). Exile was a decisive part of Zambrano’s life and her notion of subjectivity as the result of expression must be understood in that context.
The Significance of Zambrano’s Exile
This book treats the exile ontology that Zambrano developed and recontextualizes her philosophy in relation to her successive exiles. Exile led Zambrano to reconsider such things as human subjectivity , the ontological grounds of politics and human society, as well as means of thinking that would not violently reduce beings to objects of thought. Zambrano was an early philosopher who proposed a notion of the subject as constituted by acts of expressive creation. Her philosophical writings are not only interesting for a history of Spanish philosophy but is crucial for drawing the contours of a larger current of European philosophy—including authors like Hanna Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy , Primo Lewi, Giorgio Agamben and many more—which developed on the possibility of founding a new ethics and a more just society proceeding from the experiences of World War II, some of them drawing explicitly on Zambrano’s thoughts on exile (Agamben and Sofri 1985, 32–33; Agamben 1989; Bergamín and Dennis 2004).
Zambrano lived in Rome between 1953 and 1964 and she became influential in the milieu of exiled intellectuals that mingled with an emerging generation of Italian post-war philosophers. Known as “la principessa rossa” (the red princess), Zambrano befriended among others Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cristina Campo, Élemire Zolla and Elsa Morante.3 Morante’s last novel Aracoeli is famously said to have taken the name of Zambrano’s sister Araceli, with whom Morante had an intimate friendship. In the novel, Zambrano’s philosophical inspiration is visible in the way that love, as well as piety (piedad), become the solution to the violent experiences of World War II (Martínez Garrido 2009, 225–245). Zambrano is explicitly drawn upon with similar motives by a range of other Italian philosophers such as Roberto Esposito and Adriana Cavarero . Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, refer to Zambrano as an important philosopher because she tried to create an individual subject beyond the sacrificial structure of absolutism (Esposito and Nancy 2010, 71–78).
Zambrano’s major influence is to be seen in the debate about human transcendental structures or universal traits, and embodied and individual being. Esposito and Cavarero draws on Zambrano’s philosophy when criticizing the notion of the subject after Descartes, and in their respective attempts at bridging the gap between particular bodies and universal human structures. Roberto Esposito describes Zambrano’s philosophy as a kind of personalism and refers to it as a point of departure for his own critical project (Esposito 2012). Cavarero (2005, 2011) discusses the relationship between the unique individual body, and the recognizability and repetition of such things as vocal expression and expressions of pain and vulnerability, in her books For More Than One Voice and Horrorism. Drawing directly on Zambrano, she develops a theory of the voice where the human sonorous expression lays the foundation for a possible metaphysics (Cavarero 2000, 2002, 2005, 2011). For both authors, it is Zambrano’s idea of an expressive subjectivity both embodied and transcendental, that allows for thinking of subjectivity as temporary and singular, at the same time as it carries generalizable claims.
Given the importance that contemporary reconsiderations of subjectivity concede to Zambrano it is surprising that her philosophical works have received fairly little attention in international scholarship. The aim of this book is to introduce her philosophical works to a larger readership and to offer a new perspective on the philosophical roots of contemporary debate about bio-politics, materialism, vulnerability and embodiment. The book’s main contribution is the analysis of the notion of subjectivity that Zambrano elaborated within the bounds of her exile ontology and in connection to the poetic reason , la razón poética. In short, the book deals with the subject that thinks the poetic reason. I argue that the subject of poetic reason is the product of a process of expression which entails both transcendence as well as embodied moments, or what I denote as expressive subjectivity . The overall argument is built on the idea that (1) Zambrano’s philosophical project should be understood as one extended elaboration on subjectivity and exile and (2) that the relationship between the two former permits a more thorough interpretation of the poetic reason .
The book is arranged to follow Zambrano’s exile in time and geography, as she moved between Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Rome and La Pièce in France. In each chapter, a set of semiotic figures—metaphors, symbols and concepts—is discussed and interpreted in relation to Zambrano’s exile situation at the time. The philosophical and intellectual context in Cuba before the revolution—an intellectual milieu in which Spanish legacy was confronted with the re-evaluation of Afro-Caribbean culture, as well as growing political tensions—was very different from that in Rome—in which Zambrano engaged with a large group of international intellectual exiles , as well as some of the most prominent Italian thinkers—not to mention the change that it meant for her to move from the intellectual centre of Rome to the small village La Pièce on the border with Switzerland and Geneva. As will be seen in the subsequent chapters, the different circumstances of Zambrano’s exile had a profound impact on the way in which she perceived subjectivity and on the elaboration of what I hold to be an exile ontology.
In Chapter 2, “Homeland (1904–1939)” discusses Za...