Francesc-Marc Álvaro and Javier Melero chat with the philosopher and writer Joan-Carles Mèlich based on his latest work, ‘The fragility of the world’, which received the 2022 National Essay Award. Contrary to all metaphysics and self-help books, Mèlich makes a severe diagnosis of our age “of chiaroscuro and shadows” because “the task of philosophy is the present”, a dimension that should not be confused with the present, in the same way “that silence should not be confused with silence”. .
Mèlich abhors utopias and capitalized concepts, and remarks that “we have to learn to live in vertigo”. In his writings, he avoids the trap of mixing ethics and morals while warning us of something important: “Turning democracy into the end of the road is very dangerous because it generates a good conscience.”
In its pages, this professor from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona defines himself as “the walker” and, accompanied by the music of Leonard Cohen or Keith Jarret, he gets lost along the path of the philosophers, in Heidelberg, where he converses with Socrates, Kant , Nietzsche, Canetti, Orwell, Primo Levi and Lorca, to which he always returns. He assures that “decisive human relationships need time”; perhaps for this reason he transmits serenity, even when he refers to one of his great secret hobbies: zombie movies.
