A figure like Antonio Machado occupies a place of honor in the Spanish cultural archive of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, constituting one of the most studied and celebrated poets in the canon of Castilian literature. However, his intense political activism, intensified by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, has garnered less attention than the value of his literary work. This conference aims to illuminate the republican dimension of Machado, analyzed as a writer who loved the common people, as a primary school student at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), and as an admirer of the transformation of the Spanish working class led by Pablo Iglesias's PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), in line with the immense work carried out by his father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, known as Demófilo, a scholar of Andalusian folklore within the institutionalist tradition.

Program

Monday October 6 

"The retreat of the rifle butts. Politics and cultural ground in Antonio Machado" with Nuria Sánchez Madrid.

This presentation will focus on one of the key themes of Antonio Machado's theory of culture: the articulation of anthropology, culture, and politics. I will concentrate particularly on certain sections of "Juan de Mairena" and "Abel Martín," as well as on his correspondence with Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, in order to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the analysis of social forces developed by several contemporary Spanish thinkers. Within this framework, Machado emphasizes the emancipatory aspirations of the Spanish people, taking into account their specific territorial and cultural realities, in the face of the mechanisms of domination employed by the country's oligarchic and local political elites. Guided by Machado's reflections on the soul of the Spanish people, I will highlight issues such as cultural education, economic justice, and the institutional reconciliation of "high culture" and "popular culture," as central pieces for a desirable social and political transformation for a homeland that poets help to reveal and politicians to build.

"The sovereignty of good, or the politics of the good-and-generous" with Mariano Luis Rodríguez González.

I would begin with the well-known Portrait of Machado, where he characterizes himself as good in the truest sense of the word. Because there is a negative sense of "good," which we can approach through Nietzsche, and which essentially amounts to the systematic practice of lying and falsification. This is the type of personality and politics that Zambrano identifies in a selection of writings from the time of the War, when she examines the traits of the fascist man. What I intend to do is connect Antonio Machado's republicanism with his idea of ​​a fluid reality, with which the poet is able to connect simply because he loves it. Love of reality, or goodness, could perhaps inform a way of doing politics.

Moderated by Marifé Santiago Bolaños

Tuesday October 7

"Constellations. Machado and his unknown heteronyms" with Felix Duke.

Machado is usually, and rightly so, placed within the narrow Spanish framework: Unamuno, Ortega, María Zambrano, etc. But, through Bergson and Leibniz, and indirectly and belatedly through Heidegger and Scheler (and against Kant, especially), Machado's poetic metaphysics can be framed within a general European current (Levinas, René Girard, Husserl, the young Heidegger), especially active between the two great world wars, in which the critiques of what today we would call technoscience and predatory capitalism (anarchist libertarians) of individuals and the people (masses), propose as pars construens the lifeworld, in very different senses, but all of them tinged by emotionality (feeling versus perception, empathic intuition versus concept), present in heteroreferential intentionality, where consciousness is not a blank slate, just as its supposed contents are not representations, but on the one hand an intended relationship to otherness, and a desire for the donation of meaning and even incarnation in the other.

Image credits: Antonio Machado at the national presentation of the Group in the Service of the Republic, held at the Juan Bravo Theater in Segovia in 1931. From left to right: Antonio Machado, Gregorio Marañón, José Ortega y Gasset, and Ramón Pérez de Ayala. Photograph: Alfonso. Source: General Archive of the Administration (AGA) through Virtual Cervantes