The “Letter on Exile”. Method, Exile and Memory in María Zambrano.

Abstract

The current article aims to identify and explain the methodological needs that lead Zambrano to address in his “Letter on Exile” the theme of exile from the epistolary genre. Our question is framed within the inquiries that Zambrano herself made about literary genres, as alternative ways of making thought and life together. To successfully achieve this, we approach exile as one of those experiences that, according to Zambrano, refuse to be objectified by the systematic form of philosophy and from which non-systematic genres are born. Specifically, we focus on the particular experience that generates from time in exile and the methodological demands that this experience imposes on a writing style that, in the pursuit of a knowledge based on experience, tries to communicate some of it. From this analysis we will show how the “Letter” as a literary genre, serves as a response to the requirements that her own exile experience poses to Zambrano: the need for the construction of a common time between exiles and non-exiles, which is derived from the crisis of a community that the Civil War meant; time that allows the communication of a historical memory as an “evidence” of exile.