El exilio y el otro. El hogar intelectual de Luis Cernuda y María Zambrano

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas proposes that, beyond its central component of trauma and alienation, the experience of exile contains epistemological and ethical dimensions that have a paramount significance to the individual that is subject to the experience of exile. Exile offers new ways of approaching the world and the relations of the self with the other. The article explores this version of exile in two authors that, as a consequence of the Spanish Civil war, went into exile in Mexico: Luis Cernuda and María Zambrano. Cernuda’s exilic work focuses on the tension between his unequivocal rejection of the abandoned country, Spain, and his adoption of a new subliminal cultural fatherland that is composed of and defined by the great texts of international literature and art. Zambrano asserts the need for the reinsertion in the cultural discourse of the category of divinity that had been lost in modern philosophy and thought after Nietzsche. Both authors engage in a renovated compromise with an integrative vision of humanity that includes all human beings who, regardless of their differences, partake of a common archive of cultural referents. In accordance with Levinas’s seminal proposal, both Cernuda and Zambrano adopt this shared archive as their new abode which replaces the original one that they had tragically lost as a consequence of the Spanish Civil war.

Keywords

• levinas
• self
• other
• literary fatherland
• divinity
• integrative humanity.