Let me rescue this electronic log an interview I did with Felix de Azua in a remote and 1985. Appeared in a magazine that some young Philosophy adventurous students we get from those early in the year 80: Aurora, beloved title echoes Nietzsche and anarchists. The pilots of this ship of fools what constituted Gaston Segura Valero, Francesc García Donet and who is writing this, together with fellow college courses and some teachers who gave us a lesson not only of philosophy but of friendship and support: Joan Baptista Llinares, Nicolás Sánchez and Manuel E. Dura Vázquez García. At number three and the last of the magazine, devoted to the relationship between literature and philosophy, that interview was published today rescued, along with other interesting jobs such as Antonio Cabrera on Heidegger, Derrida Manuel Vázquez on, or translated, in Catalan as a text on trade Pessoa, made by Salvador Jafer, or a sheaf of aphorisms of Wallace Stevens, Francesc García Dones.
's not just nostalgia that brings me to now bring this interview, it is rather interesting because it is known wit, reflection and irony, which have already known, Azua, but here with interesting and varied modulations themes. Azua was the excessive kindness open the door of his penthouse in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bwhere énoncés lived a restless youth and undocumented, and gifts to their attention, their interest as well of giving a few books that still retains and recalls.
In that interview followed by a new session where he corrected the text to be edited out and then to have discussions on the topics and authors that stirred us to reflection, from which came the seeds that bear fruit in the publication of two of the first titles a new collection that brought Edicions 62, then, devoted to poetry and poetic reflection: issues of Defence of poetry
PB Shelley, which made Joseph V. Selma-, and Des de l'
Pensament experience of Martin Heidegger, edited and translated by Joan B. Llinares. Copied
faithfully published in the magazine, so it appears only Azúa literature to date then and as third sign my name, in memory of my maternal grandfather, a Republican and died in reprisals Jaén prison, for anyone who wanted to honor me remember his name.
Despite the elapsed time, although some questions or answers may suffer some modification or clarification, I think, in general, sustain the period and continue in full force and power provoking and sensitive. Felix de Azua I hope they share.
IN THE SILENCE IS ALL BY SAYING
Interview with Felix de Azua
by John A. Rafael Million
The itinerary of the reader a clear feature is shown: the frequent and recurrent commitment for a certain author. One is bound to glean, go to the classics and maintain a permanent appointment with a reading that you are defining. But there are certain authors who of what is and is not glean, that is, acquire a more or less pluralistic, an overview of what is produced, nor does it belong to the fortress where you hide and we provides the "art of building, from which is our" inner castle. "
Rather, authors with which one feels like, brother (hypocritical reader), who shoot at a target in which we have particular look fantastic, with which, ultimately, shares some "idea of \u200b\u200bcontemporaneity." Azua, and has long been a meeting for me is always lucky, delayed by more or less short-term appearance of his writings. Knowing it was no doubt a gift, and I learned from him, his generosity and friendly conversation. As he relates in the interview, we must trust more than those authors who are known to have been involved in its verb. Okay.
This was, in short, the motivational aspect of this interview carry out, but what she gets to look and the importance of their origin, would have been enough by themselves to it occurs. I know that I share.
For those who have not had the chance to get closer to production of Felix de Azua, go by road the following bibliography, the communicant an attitude of resolute stance path that leads to a direct reading of it (everyone knows poverty to the driving pressure of the literature, as if the knowledge of the title exempt for a thorough knowledge of that). Novel
:
Jena lessons. Barral Publishers, 1972.
Lessons suspended. Alfaguara, 1978. Last
lesson. Literary Legasa, 1981.
Mansura. Anagram, 1984.
Story:
- "Who saw," Three Tales teaching. The Gay Science, 1975.
- "Revenge of the truth," Hyperion Magazine, no? 1, 1978. Test
:
- Baudelaire. Dopes, 1978.
- The paradox of the original. Seix-Barral, 1983. Poetry
:
- Poetry 1968-1978. Hyperion, 1979 (Includes: Cepo for Otter . 1968; Veil in the face of Agamemnon , 1970; Stephane Edgar, 1971; lime Language, 1972; Pass-seven songs, 1977, and some poems Farra ).
- Farra, Hyperion, 1983.
has also translated and edited prologue Beckett, Diderot, Novalis, Holderlin
, TS Eliot, R. Barthes, etc.
Interviewer: The first question, and since the monograph will be on the subject Philosophy, Literature, would know what the relationship established between philosophical discourse and literary text. If that can arise and relationships established with so generic. Felix de Azua
: I think they can put in a generic way, in fact in my classes so I put it, addressing the possible genesis of modernity. Would pose problems: the disappearance of the division of speeches mutual implications of philosophical discourse and literary discourse, the possibility of reaching a general poetic discourse (as a utopia, I know), and signaling line or vector where should seek the Voice, or significant voice, and the same possibility located within a set of partial seizures of all other significant productions, aimed also to the dissolution of differences between artistic discourse, musical, architectural, philosophical, theoretical, scientific-technical, etc.
Ent.: You tried some of this issue in an article in The Gay Science notebooks , and he commented on the book of Benet A winter trip. It spoke of the two parallel texts (the cash and the bleeding) not deniers each other: the artistic text, literary, and the text of reason, science, explanatory. FA
.: Benet's novel, in that novel, what interested me was precisely the occurrence of the following paradox: on one side separated Benet the two speeches, and other, presenting this as a unit, supposedly literary unit (perhaps not in the novel, we need not enter here into a problem of literary criticism, but at least a pretense), unification appeared to be made is ie the separation meant the unity of both speeches and not his in-difference. And so I was interested in that novel.
Since then I think that Benet has surged in the theoretical field by making concessions in what he believed to be the field of literature, though I agree that that is the literary field, and, exclusively. I think the most interesting productions are those that tend to dissolve indifference. For example, Wittgenstein interest me, but not one that Russell and Cambridge has to offer, but the tradition of Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer disolutoria border between philosophical discourse and poetic discourse. Or, to find an example in another place, the architecture of Adolf Loos. What interests me is that architecture is the beginning of the modern movement and the modernization of the construction of citizenship, but as an isolated operation of Loos, clarifying grammatical operation expressed and embodied in an architectural order, but could have embodied in any other medium.
Ent.: Is there a "philosophical novel" or a "philosophy poetic, or is a contradiction in terms? How to talk about Proust, Musil, Beckett, Carlyle, without a philosophy or ignoring the literary?
FA.: I think that begins to speak from the middle of the twentieth century philosophical novel or poetic philosophy, because they coincide precisely. There is an article by Vidal Peña in North Notebooks which draws a parallel between Bouvard et Pecouchet of Flaubert and the Phenomenology of Spirit . And the parallels surprising. At the same trend, Victor Gómez Pin has just published a book on Proust where he presented as a real and radical philosopher, a very strict Calvinist ethic, a kind of Jansenist Proust, Proust mercantile opposite chrysanthemums and other nonsense.
If you talk about these things and if we can provide data and examples is because it is producing this convergence. What are the differences between Heidegger and certain books of what is often called a talk "poetic"? We clarify Wittgenstein: delimit, demarcate the strict domain of truth, in short, free speech is not speech mathematizable, regulated or falsifiable, which is indeed what the philosophical discourse of poetic tradition, from Plato until today.
is very telling that when Wittgenstein had visitors of those who wanted to take the land of positivity, he out of his pocket a book of poems, could be made to read it and let them completely baffled. It has become crazy, they said. On the contrary, was the only way left, to make them understand that some orders can not be given meaning only in the philosophical and poetic discourse, which has absolutely nothing to do with what is verifiable, with the truth.
After Hegel (that's the clearest break, Hegel is a door that closes and opens), is a mystery. Why, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and so on., Systematically added to pure traditional philosophical discourse, a surplus that we can only describe as "literary"? What need to be philosophical discourse is also a speech "literary"? What is a need for internal reflection of the philosophy, and therefore is already involved in the Western philosophical tradition itself, or its " end "?
Ent.: What do you think the philosophy is done in Spain lately knowing that you are working from very different fields and there is difficulty of prosecuting in general?
FA.: In the philosophical contemporary English I trust that I know more oral than can known in writing. So I respect enormously certain philosophers, but because I've heard, not because they only have read. I tend to be wary of reading. For example, I am interested Francisco Jaramillo, Victor Gomez Pin, Eugenio Trias, Peña Vidal himself and many names now forgotten. I find a group, a generation, or whatever you call it, philosophers truly honored. In all honesty I understand the mere separation of civil service practice.
Ent.: How these philosophers pick up the English philosophical tradition which, though reduced, has not ceased to spin through the years, at least in the field of study?
FA .: The philosophical discourse can not be a "national" discourse ever. The great advantage of this group is that absolutely none of them, fortunately, has followed the slightest tradition of English thought, because he would have sunk in utter disbelief.
Ent.: Let us now turn to another question. What is poetry? When asked this question, do you have to suspend the trial or has to be continued attempts to develop, driven by the passion of poetry, as Jakobson, a task of clarification, you know? FA
.: Well, the question of "what is poetry?" is the same as "what is thought? "or" What is the meaning? ". is a question that has no solution and it is a question that real and true. The questions that have solutions are not really philosophical questions, in my view. The question is characteristically philosophical one that has no solution, ie one that always arises as a dynamic reflection that has no end and therefore will adapt to the needs of the articulation of the question in every age and at all times. So "What is poetry?" should lead the addition of poetry "here and now." What is poetry here and now? may not be reply only in a poetic or metaphorical. And if I had to respond in those terms I would say that poetry here and now is all that language production that causes scandal. No scandal is impossible for a producci6n language or whether poetic significance.
define the poetic word as the word refers to the scandal scandalous in theological terms, of the theological tradition of the Christian legend. The word full of significance was eminently evangelical word, was the one who created a scandal. And it should be still provoke outrage. Since the word evangelical has lost its theological function, this loss of function was vindicated by what we call "poetic" in general. Not now, from Luther, which is where I would place the boundary. Call "poetic" to fool for common sense. In this regard, I take seriously the proposal of Hegel: Lutheran revolution, the Reformation, is indeed the end of the scandal of the Christian religion, rationalization, its domestication, its nationalization.
Ent.: Would agree well with the Counter-Reformation, but as produced in Mediterranean countries. FA
.: How to see?
Ent.: With the nationalization that occurs in the Catholic, with the staging ... FA
.: Staging by our side. On the one hand nationalization, on the other drama, but bereft of real religious content. And that legacy can not see shocking figures that make us individuals to be outrageous: Hölderlin, for example.
Ent.: "Everyone who stubbornly write verses, just to speak like savages. Or animals? FA
.: You have to put that in the context of everything I say in the introduction of Farra. Talk like animals means here that have a specific voice, and specific means the species. For example, the voice of the lion is only the lion, like the gazelle is the gazelle. The poet, if there is that in times of misery, has a specific voice, in the sense that it becomes a kind voice, and his voice is distinct from all others, as the voices of each animal species are differentiated from one another.
Ent. What do you think of the poetic tradition of the classics of English poetry (from Garcilaso, through the Baroque, to the generation of twenty-seven)? So how has influenced you? FA
.: I do not like to talk about these things because I think not good about them, at least as often speak of them often. Clearly influenced me, but like you can influence a child you had a Galicia and Asturias chacha. The fact that learning the language do it with Jorge Manrique and San Juan de la Cruz is absolutely crucial. However, it is also true that the central challenge of the sixties and seventies, when he left that list, and other corny like that, was a battle against heredity as determination: the determination of the voices by nationality, etc. And so the reaction was so strong. Now, that seems like a dream film cosmopolitanism.
The situation at the time that my generation began to publish rather than to write, was a situation similar to the Vienna The Man Without Qualities Musil, that is, the utter confusion of speeches and references. It was the huge dump of the confusion and hypocrisy Franco. There was no choice but to take the knife and cut one way, if you want, child, pretentious and irrelevant, but surely there was nothing, that clarification was needed.
Ent.: You consider Castellet anthology as a work at that time had an absolute significance. What remains of the newest, your proposal? FA
.: Get used to this kind of acts are timely. And the emergence of the anthology at the time was significant. Now he has lost all meaning, the circumstances are entirely different. When he said that his meaning was founded, I mean two things: That it was necessary to produce a rupture, and that was the work of Castellet rather than the anthology, and that was well done from the point of view of a certain honesty sociological, because I remember Castellet worked on a monumental amount of books and manuscripts, ie that Castellet, which is an honest man, was not limited to books published, but read all sorts of manuscripts. I think they were close to five hundred. Of course there were exclusions unjust, or otherwise, but the work was serious, it was no frivolity.
Ent.: Is there, like a passion for literature, an enjoyment of reading, a passion, criticism? That shiver that shakes us when we read literature, "is denied, paragraph, as we work to thoughtful, critical, or is converted, otherwise survives? FA
.: Take the case of Baudelaire. Almost all readers have read Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal . But what few people have read the critical work of Baudelaire, which is very extensive, and so great an interest as Les Fleurs du Mal . Many people have read poems by Shelley, very few have read the poetry Defense, which is a wonderful text and important as his poetry. The Keats Letters are as good as his poetry, as well as Letters of Saint-John Perse. These differences is best to try to suppress them.
Ent.: Just for the Defense poetry of Shelley left Valencia version made by the Art Professor at our University, JoséVicente Selma. FA
.: Selma I know, he has a studio on Novalis really good. I never knew Shelley had translated. Where is edited?
Ent.: In a small publishing company called Fuentearnera Valencia. And send it to you. But let us continue with the questions. Estimate what you think about the narrative that is produced today in Spain, in what some have been called "new English narrative." As a reader and as an agent of it? FA
.: In all sincerity, contemporary English fiction I've read very little. It is normal, and so is almost all people who write. It is very difficult if you do this, being interested in what they write your classmates. In the better is unfair, but true. Because when you write, it is normal that some field will reduce to the readings that you have marked from the outset (Dostoyevsky, Proust, etc..) That you have to go back again and again, and the other hand, your contemporaries, you tend to read more from an informational standpoint. I practically read the Benet present only when Sanchez Ferlosio deigns to write something, something of Juan García Hortelano and little else. Oh, and Eduardo Mendoza, Carlos Trias, Femández Javier de Castro, Vicente Molina Foix, but hey, these are my friends and I read his books the same way I hear their stories of holidays or travel. Can not say I know much about contemporary English fiction.
Ent.: In your own narrative is a clear shift in the direction of the writing process, Lessons from Jena up Last lesson, and suspended from lessons your last delivery, Mansura . How would you explain this demarche in your narrative? Certainly this should be noted on the back of Mansura, the allegorical reading, I am unable to planteármela. FA
.: Do not do much for the backs, although they are the most widely read literary genre in Spain. Perhaps alone. The first series of my novels, which corresponds to the "Lessons" has a unit, but now we will not get into that issue. Is a unit that works, or that I was the claim that work, in a coordinated manner, with an initial proposal, say, child, played in a world of childish and naive, a second part quite negative, which almost exclusively arise in terms of pure abstraction and conceptualization of what happened before, and a synthetic which returns to the natural world, naive, but with all the negative contents of memory. And that closes the matter. Mansura is a hinge, a starting point, I do not know if I'll ever write prose, you never know ...
Ent.: Do not you dare to do that, right? FA
.: (Laughs). But in any case, anything to re-write (well actually there is one thing I have three hundred pages, but what happens is that I am not convinced), should be on the side that starts in Mansura , nudes, clear line of taking the entire course and re-raise, as Flaubert said the Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller : like a Gothic window in which each figure is a separate and defined.
Ent.: Let us now the journey to the capital Baudelaire. What is the figure that "modernity" as poetic operation that you see in Baudelaire? FA
.: It's a fairly extensive set of features. Many of them dealt with by Benjamin. But the funny thing is he does not comment on that text that is essential The artist of modern life , a text on Constantin Guys, which is the famous text on the dandy. Benjamin perhaps prepare something larger about it and fails to finish, do not know because the text is essential.
in general and summarizing the elements of "modernity" in Baudelaire would be: on the one hand the acceptance of the metropolis as a new nature. He writes that between 1850 and 1860 and if you look at all the intellectuals of France, England, etc., Quite the opposite happens: the negation of the modern industrial city and that nostalgia for the bucolic. Baudelaire is the first to accept the metropolis and nature. Secondly, the acceptance of anonymity and the masses. That is, the passage of a universal subject or the "eternal man" of humanism, a new subject, quirky and weird, which are the masses of citizens, the crowd, "I foul. Thirdly, the proposal of the moment as temporality of the modern artist: That is, not an artistic discourse to refer to a extratexto a metatexo, a transcendental rhetoric: history, religion, morality, etc., but instantly deprived of all external discourse. The difference is, in Benjamin's terms, which runs from Hegelian Zeitgeist, the Jetzeit Benjamin's Baudelaire. Something like Hegel carry infinitesimal. Fourth, allegedly blatant acceptance of the work of art as commodity, loss of aura, etc. And finally, the denial of any possibility of maintaining artistic production as mimesis, as if an external object noun, and the assumption of pure artistic production and production in-significance or rest. These would be the essential points.
Ent.: I asked, in a review to the translation of Carlos Pujol The Flowers of Evil, which is undertaken the translation of Baudelaire's art critic. What we offer that Baudelaire? FA
.: Baudelaire essay works and criticism for a living, and is a huge production. And between that's all there. But it is essential for one reason: if you observe in 1860 the landscape of aesthetic reflection, it is monstrous, Hegel died in 30, and the only thing between 30 and 60 is either idealist, escapist ramblings by English criticism, or absolute invalid in France.
Ent.: Morris ... FA
.: Morris, Ruskhin, etc., Are very interesting, of course, but still anchored in the pastoral When you read to see who is accepting Baudelaire phenomena decisive for us, not theological-bourgeois delights of Prerafaelistas that we are alien. Items such as the French cartoonist or articles on the Paris Salon, or The artist of modern life are a boldness that only can be compared to Nietzsche. The amazing thing is that you have to wait to 1930, with Benjamin, that is taken into account. Ie, 1860 to 1930 ... A real scandal.
Ent .: In the beginning of your Baudelaire say that the only movement that has opposed the lyrics seriously Baudelaire would be inaugurated by Socialist Realism. But would it not also consider Heidegger, with his criticism of technology, recovery of the peasant, and so on.? FA
.: No, I see absolutely modern Heidegger. In Heidegger is reactionary traits sociologically and thinking is tinged classicism and conservatism, but good, also Nietzsche, Montaigne or Kerkegaard. But instead their thinking is essential to an understanding of modernity, particularly its reflection on nihilism. You can be agree or disagree with his reading of Nietzsche, but all the readings we have read in the twentieth century the only one who can keep thinking about where everything was planned. He is a man that every time you open a box that looked like cookies, is it Pandora's box and start dating demons.
And the aesthetic (the word, "aesthetic" is dangerous) is essential, because it is a man whose ability to explain the essential elements allows you to expand the horizon of reflection. I remember that began to interest the aesthetic thought of Heidegger (before I had been concerned as representative of existentialism "was the time of Camus, Bataille, etc.) the day I read a book (I forget which, I think The origin of the artwork ) in which he was speaking of music, and for that he understood the call to the Angelus bell of the village church. When we think of "music" which is set before us is the music "written", and therefore retained in memory, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, but that is the written music, disturbed by a concrete technical effect is the use of musical notation. But it is a shock. At the moment someone refers to a music whose writing is somewhere else ... it's as if your chest capacity is multiplied by ten.
Ent.: When talking about Romanticism is often a gap into confusion and Memec in that mix terms like "feelings", "taste for the night shift," "subjectivism", without explaining what subjectivity, what speaks the romantic feelings. Is there a romance? You have mentioned in an article the existence of two generations, what unites them? FA
.: You already see that you can not fit into one package, it lowers the term. "Romantic", the brothers Schlegel and Victor Hugo. It's crazy, right? In that text. I meant a first romantic moment that could be defined as purely negative, and I think that is more interesting: the legacy of the Sturm und Drang English and its transmission, ie, the Germany of the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, etc.., and in England, Wordsworth, above all, and Coleridge. Is a negative moment of destruction of the previous conceptual apparatus. The second wave, coma any second wave, is affirmative and, so to speak, puts his feet on the rubble to build a new building and the houses there and lose some interest.
The first generation has a clear enemy to destroy, symbolized the French Revalución, the second generation fighter and is not destructive, does not have that facility. The characteristic the second generation is boredom: There is nothing to do. Therefore there is a "romance" of boredom, boredom, resignation monstrous horror-fantasy, which is the generation of the Holy Alliance. And yet, it is still getting into the same bag the moment of assault and the time of resignation.
Ent.: Another phenomenon that has interested you was the figure of Diderot. What has led Diderot to philosophy and what has been innovation in the literary? FA
.: Successes in the park asked the assist is for philosophy and literature as the "innovation", The Diderot extraordinary is that Rameau's Nephew . This book is the clarity that is amazing. On the one hand strictly literary innovation especially Rameau's Nephew the rest is expendable, but perfectly interesting. His contribution in natural philosophy, ethics, etc., Has almost no interest. In aesthetics, however, has a great importance. To the world of aesthetic reflection of its time, Diderot puts the elements of a trial that, after the French Revolution, will be general. But do not make systematic use of these items is limited to find them. These elements are difficult to delineate because they are mostly elements of doubt, ambiguity, by the way, the hinge, which interest only when they deny, but not when they say. If I had to sum up the essence of aesthetic reflection, would be the question of a fairly radical relations between subject and object. That is, the theoretical tradition of mimesis that had been developed without serious contradiction from Alberti to Watteau. Diderot has serious doubts about such a thing to eat a Nature or Model Ideal exists, and that is the "object" of painting. Diderot realizes that the subject has included the subject in its reflection, eat properly spiritual, and that by so there is nothing out there. Nothing left out. Pera back horrified and refuses to continue thinking that abyss.
Ent .: Beckett. What is the writing of Beckett? What has meant the adventure Beckett for literature? FA
.: So, why not rather Beckett and anything else? Well, not only Beckett, of course. We are accustomed to speaking of oddities: we say "Beckett", as in a forest say this is a "cork" or that is an "oak." Pera in fact there are individuals and groups: forests and trees. Beckett is a specific tree within a forest that is becoming a pretty thick. This forest includes course Kafka, Bernhard, in a Morandi painting, and sculpture to Giacometti. Why is this set of production and reflection? Perhaps, once again, could be summed up by a metaphor: as the block more strongly committed to a definition of what is the destination to which Beckett is defined as follows: a place large enough to move, but not just enough torque to go somewhere.
Ent.: Beckett's writing does not lead to silence, but approaching it. Why should it be so prolific? FA
.: Not that leads to silence, is installed in the silence. You have to understand the silence, as when speaking of Wittgenstein I said. Just as everything that can be said and that gives us meaning without membership the order of truth. In the silence is all to say.
Ent.: My last question will go in the direction of a subject that interests me and that I'm writing a paper: Gabriel Ferrater and the group that formed around that advanced was the magazine Laye. FA
.: When I met him was, like all important things, a living, so I go back to what I said in the beginning: the oral, oral education, which is the only truly irreplaceable, the only really important, everything else is expendable, to some extent. He was killed ... and what happened just happens to poets. As you know, is only poet once dead, while living, are, at most, a writer of verse. What distinguishes the poet is dead after growing at a tremendous rate of speed. We who had read about him, as we liked, we could not even imagine how it would grow in ten years. That growth is always a surprise. See how a "writer of verse" poet dies.
He was convinced, by the influence of his generation and the historical moment that made poetry of the everyday, as Jaime Gil de Biedermann. When you read it now, the least important is the part that may relate to Auden and stuff. And what is becoming more essential is the part that is a poet of reflection Trakl and Benn as that is where experience as an experience of everyday life, is absolutely secondary. In short: it has no hair "psychology."
Ent.: It was also a particular shock to the introduction of thought that was made outside Spain. It was an introducer of currents of thought and irreplaceable controversial at the time. FA
.: Enormously. I remember I had some seminars with him and was curious because we did not understand anything (would some twenty years by then), but we realized that it was possible to read otherwise. And it is the true teaching, when suddenly you realize that it is possible to do otherwise what you were doing.
In the introduction to the history of the Renaissance , old book of the nineteenth century, Burckhardt says there are two types of teachers: those who teach you things, and others, rather than show it, you hold hands and raise you at a height where you yourself are able to see the big picture. Ferrater Gabriel belongs to the latter type of teachers.
