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Your field of expertise is the Philosophy of Law, but your last book is a memoir. Is a text like that written for posterity?
Yes. But there's a quote from Keats going around in my head:
“here lies one whose name was writ in water”
I thought it was fantastic as a thought
on posterity coming from a great poet
I don't consider long posterities, because I know the size and usefulness of what I do
It's for very close people, for living people
In this case, my memoirs have been induced by the re-writing of Spanish history
that has been going on these last 30 or 35 years
There has been very little reflection about the past
I think I now have a more complete vision of what the PSUC, for example, was
it was the main anti-Franco opposition party and it diluted into nothingness in a few years
Or of the people who became enthusiastic doing really dangerous things back then
and that, later, became easily accommodated to the system we have now
it seemed to me that telling that experience and where it came from was important
in order not to let this false narration of a history
which is much more complex than people usually say, be accepted without protest
But you have opted for a personal memoir. Why not an analytical book?
This, for two subjective reasons
Firstly, when I started I felt incapable of analysis
I was too worried by the possibility that my life ended soon
Secondly, I knew I had a storyteller inside
Even in my job -in the field of Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law- I have been very narrative
I wanted to test myself in this field because I thought I could do well
Death changes one's view because, without it, everything would be different. Does it give meaning to life?
No. Death is what takes meaning away from life
Life can be lived and well, in the worst circumstances, as long as you have a project
When you can't carry it forward, life has no meaning
I have heard this from other people who were at a real risk of losing their lives and I agree
Life has a meaning while there's a project to follow or chase
If not, life is a mere biological fact
In your book you talk about giving existence a meaning. How does one do that?
Accepting a project and rejecting others. Fundamentally, rejecting.
In the philosophical perception I'm more of a negativist than a stater of things
Colleagues of mine and great authors like Perelman and Amartia Senn
have devoted many pages to the idea of justice
Pages and very refined formulations by Senn and his school
However, in this world justice doesn't exist. There are injustices
people have devoted many efforts to elaborating theories of justice
and how to achieve it, about what it consists of
More or less we already know what it consists of. We know formally
But, at the time of truth, what there really is are injustices
and many of them happen to people who have no voice to express the injustice that is done to them
I believe this negative perception is more fecund
for thought and for action than the rather platonic or modelic -kantian, if you will- view about what's good, what's just
When you talk about a project are you talking about a collective or an individual one?
In my case it's a collective project, but for an artist it may be an individual one
These days I was thinking about the case of André Weil, Simone Weil's brother
That man has been one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century
Unlike her sister, when World War II started, he went to Finland
and refused to go back to France to fight the Germans
He had to spend the rest of his life in the United States
because in France that attitude of objecting to a war -which was defensive and, probably not unfair- wasn't well considered
He was a mathematician and he knew he could contribute more to humanity
as a mathematician than as a short-sighted person taken to the front
to act as an artillery officer or something like that
In this case, the individual project was justified