As a result of Spain’s participation as the guest of honor at the 2022 Frankfurt Book Fair, more than one person confirmed that the presence of narrators was much higher than that of non-fiction authors and, specifically, that of philosophers. was especially small.
Since the filter for the invitations was that the authors had been translated into German, and since the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Cultural Action together with other entities had launched a substantial program to help translations in previous years, in this terrain with little success, the dominant conclusion was that Spanish thought, today, travels poorly.
And that was shocking just when a highly popular Spanish cultural essay, The Infinity in a Junco, by Irene Vallejo – which was not a philosophical text but was not as far removed from them as a narrative one – was becoming an unstoppable global bestseller. .
The debate about the reasons for this travel limitation resurfaced last December at a lunch for cultural journalists convened in Barcelona by the Formentor Foundation. Several of those present expressed their interest in delving deeper into the issue, but the first person to pick up the gauntlet was Jaume Boix Angelats, director of the veteran and always stimulating magazine El Ciervo, who dedicates a dossier in its latest issue to the question ” What are we thinking about?”
“We realized – Boix recapitulates in his introductory editorial – that there are not currently, and perhaps there have not been in many other years, Spanish thinkers who have a place in the European and global debate of ideas”, a comparable place “to what other areas of culture have”, such as the plastic arts, cinema or the novel.
Why is this happening? Why don’t we influence the international debate? The Deer asks a range of intellectuals. Victoria Camps regrets that in our universities more theses are presented on Foucault or Habermas than on Ortega or Zambrano and denounces that “we lack self-esteem and self-love: we are not xenophobic but we are endophobic.”
Javier Gomá confirms that Spain has maintained a problematic relationship with modernity, which it nevertheless acceded to with the 1978 Constitution and entry into the EU. But the regrets of the past and the lack of successful cultural diplomacy are the reason why the balance in the international market of ideas remains unfavorable.
It is the situation that must be corrected, since, in his words, “there is a powerful Spanish concept that, if known, would improve cosmopolitan conversation.”
Antonio Monegal argues that although globalization favors the circulation of ideas, in Europe the cultural hegemonies of France, Germany, England and its “transatlantic cousin” the United States have not disappeared.
Monegal highlights the current projection of Paul B. Preciado, achieved from the speakers of Paris and the United States, and agrees with Gomá in requiring better instruments of institutional support.
Cristina Calero considers that “we are heirs of a suffocating past,” from which we must escape through a profound transformation (although she does not specify what this would consist of). Daniel Innerarity demands from our philosophers “more topics of universal interest and aspiration”, since “foreign publishers only bet on those authors who guarantee them a sufficient economic return, especially taking into account the costs of translation.”
And Basilio Baltasar, essayist and director of the Formentor Foundation who promoted the debate, points out that Spain’s entry into modernity had a fatal coincidence with the emergence of postmodern thought, which inaugurated “a process of dismemberment” and generated confusion here in the face of changes in the European paradigm.
“Bauman considered annihilated the humanist ideals that the Spain of the transition hoped to recover. The postmodern condition, weak thought and liquid society, stunned thinkers, undid their rhetoric and disrupted the full organization of Spain in Europeanist culture. We arrived late. Again,” Baltasar asserts pessimistically.
