I mezzadri di dio. La metafora del castello in María Zambrano tra Teresa d’Avila e Franz Kafka

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on Zambrano’s themes of dream and time, of the dialectic between passivity and action, and of the definition of novel and tragedy, starting from the exploration of an architecture and a place understood metaphorically. The metaphor of the castle, in fact, on which Zambrano focuses on some of his writings on Kafka, seems to take on such significance that it acquires autonomy with respect to the specific reflections on the Czech writer, becoming central in the definition of certain categories of Zambrano’s thought. Moreover, Spanish thought is not new to the metaphorical exploration of the castle, which occupies a prominent place in the panorama of Christian mysticism with Teresa of Avila’s famous writing, The Interior Castle. Starting from some crucial passages of the texts dedicated to Kafka by the Spanish thinker, the article therefore proposes an analysis of the metaphor of the castle within the framework of a comparison with the writing of the mystic from Avila. In this way, the exploration of this metaphor not only allows us to identify important theoretical plexuses of Zambrano’s reflection and to glimpse its extraordinary and autonomous proliferation of meaning, but also allows us to reflect in a novel way on those two opposing forms of mysticism that Zambrano calls “creation mysticism” (or poetics) and “nihilist mysticism”.

Keywords

• castle
• metaphor
• mysticism
• franz kafka
• teresa of avila