PIETY AND RUINS IN MARÍA ZAMBRANO’S ISLAND EXILE

Abstract

From the 1940s, that is, after the disaster and horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the philosopher María Zambrano was able to gestate in America, especially in the heart of Cuba, a different reality, poetic in its form (prenatal, secret and sacred) and historical in its depth, from which two decisive concepts gravitate:  piety and ruins; one, an exact image of human virtue, the other, of history. Both instances will make it possible to continue unveiling the creative capacity of the person and to place him or her in a stage prior to discursive knowledge, that which led to the anthropocentrism and solipsism of the modern era in the West and that will lead to the spiritual and political-moral crisis of the contemporary world. In turn, piety and ruins will entail a careful meditation on being – in its essential heterogeneity, following in the wake of Machado – and time – in its plastic multiplicity – and its corresponding and homonymous trace: nostalgia for loss and the awareness of becoming.