Barcelona Metropolis

I came to Barcelona for my university education. I was dazzled by the amount of things that could be done, due to the anonymity of the big city. The years 1973 and 1974 were carefree and subversive, with a certain anarchism that ended suddenly with the attack on the Scala nightclub in 1978, which has never been fully clarified. The same anarchism was found at Zeleste and could also be seen in Plaça Reial with figures such as Ocaña. I remember that when they invited Federica Montseny to Montjuïc, she seemed surprised not to know who the enthusiastic hippies were gathered in the crowd. It was a Barcelona very divided between the hippies and the politically engaged. It has been explained this way many times, but I think there were many bridges between both sides. If you were from Barcelona all this may not have seemed so exciting, but I was coming from Girona, which at that time was almost a provincial city, with very little theatre and very little cinema ...

I would spend my days at the Filmoteca and my nights at Zeleste. At the same time, I had many ties and lived with people who were politically engaged. I lived in many shared flats: on the Rambla de Catalunya, before the Olympics, where the transvestites would prostitute themselves; in Sarrià, in Sagrada Família, in Hostafrancs ...

Yes, especially in Hostafrancs. I collaborated with the neighbourhood association and I was a travel companion of my friends from the PSUC. Barcelona was very exciting at that time because everything was about to change. It was already happening, but there was a feeling that everything was about to change. And Franco’s death, which was celebrated with a bold and contented enthusiasm, ended up exploiting all this. Everyone sees an end to the Franco regime, but in the great demonstrations of “Freedom, amnesty and autonomy status” it was necessary to run. And in these demonstrations and struggles, while many of us sported a sticker with the logo of the Government of Catalonia with the words “We want the statute,” my anarchist friends carried one that said: “We want a vermouth!”

There was a bit of everything: apolitical types and staunch supporters of the regime, as well as teachers and students who were organised in reading groups. For example, there was a seminar that met on Saturdays to read Das Kapital with Antoni Domènech, Manuel Cruz, Gerard Vilar... There was a lot of activity, sometimes a lot of institutional paralysis, but it was still possible to do many things that are not done today, probably because they can be done outside. Back then, the university was something of refuge because the chancellor was still the authority. Now the chancellor would rather let the police enter or almost be the one to call them.

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do philosophy, it was a possibility... I had thought about studying cinema, which you could only do in Madrid, but in my house we weren’t so sure, and I thought: “I’ll work and do it later.” I took some courses after finishing my degree, but it ended up as almost nothing. I was stuck between cinema, the classics and philosophy, and in the second course, which at the time was called common courses, I had Emilio Lledó and was fascinated about how you could study and think starting from the Greek classics.

Yes, and I do not think that literature or cinema are illustrations of thought. Sometimes, in philosophy we tend to think that they are mere illustrations and that what really matters is the concept. I think there can be dialogue, and in this, sometimes, it is not philosophy that commands, but what the narration or narrative would be. An important part of literature, and cinema by extension, offers visions that allow us to think or imagine what experience may have been like in another era or elsewhere in the world. I believe that narrative and cinema are very interesting for paying attention to syntax. In philosophy I do not say that we write poorly, but I am sure that we write strangely, and some more strangely than others. The language of philosophy has a desire for abstraction that nominalises verbs, that makes linguistic turns that are conceptual at the same time and, although perhaps necessary, are highly compensated if we tend to cinema, literature... It is very interesting to see how a film is built, what phrases are included, what syntax, what goes before and what goes later, how each frame drags along the meaning of the previous one and is open to that of the later ones.

Poetry interests me very much, maybe because I don’t know how to write it. To me, it seems like a language that could be brought closer to this weird language of philosophy, but really it’s a language that is only strange because, on the one hand, it goes to the essence and, on the other, it makes words resonate. Poetry is admired for the ability to say what cannot be said. I also believe that it has the virtue identified by Wystan Hugh Auden: “Blessed be all metrical rules / that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts / free from the fetters of Self.”

During my studies I had a series of typical professors from Spain at the end of the Franco period, with very little curiosity, very by-the-book and very close to the Church, on the right, conservative... Later, some professors started to introduce what seemed subversive at the time: analytical philosophy, Marxist thought… As a result, we got turned on to both analytical thought and Marxism. My thesis was a mixture of both. I tried to study the limits of dialectical materialism from an analytical point of view. In fact, it was a kind of ingenuous dialogue between Marxism and analytical philosophy or positivism.

That was very much a product of the time, but it taught me a lot about thinking with a certain order and approaching Hegel beyond the manuals of dialectical materialism. From the blend of Marxism and analytics, I began to take an interest in related to thinking about politics. But not by using political theory or a Marxist model, with which I was not unfamiliar, but rather by asking the questions: “What does it mean to understand the past? What does historiography mean?” These subjects led me to the philosophy of action, to paying attention to the retrospective story, which, when I found Arendt, was very helpful to me. And Arendt also helped me to question some of the things I had done until then. In fact, even if there is now a desire to turn her thinking into a kind of discourse that fits everywhere, I think that it is very uncomfortable for what we usually think about and for what I thought at the time.

Yes, I had read it by chance before devoting all the years that I have spent. I had read On Revolution, which left me indignant or at least very perplexed. I had read passages of The Human Condition that surprised me because they spoke about birth and not about mortality.

I returned later, when the Philosophy and Gender Seminary was created, which began largely because the students asked why there were no female philosophers. We put some professors and a few young students or PhD students together to work. We thought that there were very few female philosophers and we saw that we had opened a whole field of research that has lasted from the early 1990s until today. At that time we divided up a few female philosophers to work on, to translate... And I chose the one that had left me so perplexed.

At first, and almost always, it worked due to the availability that people had at the time. We divided into subgroups that met at the weekends. We read, discussed, wrote articles... For example, we did an issue of the journal Archipiélago on Arendt. We also did a monograph, “El cos de les idees” [The Body of Ideas], in the Transversal journal, featuring Ada Colau and Carmen Corral. We finished the first translation of an interview with Judith Butler. The goal was to find texts, read them, translate them... Alongside the recovery of female philosophers, some of us had an interest in training and in discussing contemporary feminist theory. At that time, we created a small group and read Luce Irigaray, Italians like Alessandra Bocchetti and female philosophers like the Diotima ones...

Yes, the feminist theory reading group varied in components, but the constants were Maite Larrauri, Mercè Marçal, Rosa Rius, Carmen Corral and myself... and for while Anabel Mejuto and some young people participated, coming and going depending on their availability and the period. We wanted to create a joint discourse and a monograph on authority came out, in which Mercè Marçal and Maite Larrauri played major roles. Maite because she was closely linked to Italian thought on difference, which at that time argued about authority. And Mercè, because she had struggled for the transmission and visibility of literary work by women for many years. The group was very productive, although together we only finished this piece on authority. And through Mercè Marçal, the group achieved the talent to get the best out of each member, weaving relationships between the Seminary and the Comitè d’Escriptores del Centre Català del Pen Club. Consisting of Mercè Marçal, Montserrat Abelló, Josefa Contijoch, Mercè Ibarz, Lluïsa Julià, Neus Aguado and others, this committee organised a large number of activities. One of the most interesting was  “Cartografies del desig” [Cartographies of Desire], a set of dramatised lectures with the participation of actresses, musicians, composers, singers and pianists, with Araceli Bruch, the soul and driving force behind that innovative project.

Yes, to the structure and the relationships within the universities. It is the way that power groups are made. “You are on my side and not on the others’ side,” almost always related to the contempt that you supposedly have for others. It is seldom thought that someone is writing something that may or may not be interesting. It’s a way of “producing schools.” I would say that the Seminary has not been linked to producing schools. It is true that there are currents, but these common spaces that have arisen from the feminist effort to convey, to think together, have had and have to do with knitting different relationships, which is the opposite of the idea of creating coteries. Even though the image of feminism is always presented as made of coteries.

I think that a huge part of feminism has been inherited from the great movement of the 1970s, though it has gone on changing, and has transformed a bit since the early 21^st century. At one point, the importance of what was being done was taken seriously. This is a feature of most women who have left or have found themselves outside the norm as a result of their female status: knowing that what they are doing is important. Arendt is one case of this and Simone Weil is another. They are aware that they are contributing something, despite knowing that it is possible that it remain in the margin of the margins. As soon as the importance of what has been done is taken seriously, there is a desire to weave relationships, to weave institutions...

The issue of transmission has always been there in the Philosophy and Gender Seminary, but what there was at first was discovery: the discovery of texts, the possibility of translating... Perhaps, basically, translating and transposing are already ways to transmit. But at first, we felt the need to make female philosophers visible, which was quite hard to do. Given the hindered history of transmission of the work of women, it has often been thought that it is important and that it must be transmitted to repair a historical injustice. The work of women has been excluded from history, but it seems to me, and not only to me, that it is also important to transmit the work of female philosophers because they fill theoretical lacunae that would otherwise remain. Its contribution is important for rethinking the conceptual tools we have. Recovering them helps us in the present, and not just to remain content that we have repaired a historical injustice.