María Zambrano: Delirium and Destiny, Memory and History

Abstract

This paper examines María Zambrano’s most important writings, in which she shows a more or less clear concern for the theory and, above all, the practice of critical memory, under the impulse of her own liminal experience as an exile, as a direct witness of European violence, and as the creator of a shipwrecked thought with a vocation for the margin. Specifically, her book Delirio y destino (1952), her ‘Carta sobre el exilio’ (1961), her prologue to the 1977 edition of Los intelectuales en el drama de España, and certain reflections contained in El hombre y lo divino (1955) and Notas de un método (1989).