The work of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano constitutes one of the most original contributions to 20th century thought. Her life, and the development of her ideas are marked, like those of her contemporaries Walter Benjamin, Edmund Husserl, Hannah Arendt or Theodor Adorno, by the crisis of modernity that culminates in the two World Wars.

 

A Republican exile since 1939 from the Spanish Civil War, another manifestation of that European crisis, Zambrano understood that the collapse of Europe was a symptom of the radical demise of modernity and its thought systems. She would devote her philosophical career to thinking through that crisis and to reconstructing alternatives to it. That her critique of rationalism and totality was a direct result of her considering them responsible for the catastrophes of modern times and the proliferation of authoritarianism, will not strike anyone familiar with 20th political philosophy as very original. What is remarkable, and highly questionable, is that her critique, despite its relevance, is so little known beyond Spanish borders, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world.

 

A similar argument can be made with respect to her original explorations of alternative roots of salvation from the “noche oscura de lo humano” (dark night of the human): her investment in a new anthropology of the human, where sacrifice and violence have no place and radical democracy is widespread; her proposal of a new “aurora” (dawn), a history lived against the grain of the tyranny of modern temporality, and instead attuned to the intimate, submerged times that memory and its ruins reveal; her commitment to the political reality and the metaphor of radical exile as bare life, a defense of the margin as a space of hope, critique and renewal; the heterodoxies in her redefinition of reason; the proposal of new philosophical paradigms to be found in poetry, an its implications for feminism.

 

In short, Zambrano’s writings provide us with multiple echoes of many of the most important philosophical questions of our times. She produced the kind of seminal work that can productively illuminate fields and approaches of enquiry ranging from democracy, totalitarianism, feminism, exile and diaspora or memory. And yet, her voice is oddly absent from most of those discussions as they take place in the English-speaking world.

 

The purpose of this international conference is to recuperate María Zambrano as an important 20th century thinker, and to increase the visibility of her work for an English-speaking audience. We invite proposals for 30 minute papers on any aspect of Zambrano’s work that argue the philosopher’s relation and relevance to major trends and authors in contemporary philosophy and thought.

 

A selection of the papers will become part of a volume to be published in 2016.

 

The conference language will be English

 

The conference organisers are:

 

Mari Paz Balibrea (Birkbeck, University of London)

Francis Lough (University of Birmingham)

Antolín Sánchez Cuervo (Instituto de Filosofía-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

 

To submit your abstract, register for the conference or contact the conference organisers, please use the 'Register' tab at the top of the page or click here.

 

The deadline to submit proposals for papers (up to 300 words) is 18th January, 2015.