Memoria del mal

In May 2003 the twelfth edition of the «Aranguren Conferences» was held. Jorge Semprún gave three keynote speeches titled «Kant and the Maquis’ rucksack», «The radical evil and the Buchenwald latrines» and «Literature and memory of the evil: from Sartre to Paul Ricoeur», all of them grouped under the generic denomination Memory of Evil. The thread running through the three speeches was Semprún’s experience as a political deportee at Buchenwald concentration camp, so close to the Weimar camp of Schiller and Goethe. There, he could experience the radical evil, but also the brotherhood through the antifascist resistance groups who coordinated the various clandestine political groups at the camp. This experience helped him review some of the philosophical readings he had done as a philosphy student at the Sorbonne, as well as those readings he took an interest in following the end of the war. In this way, Semprún went over various authors (Immanuel Kant, André Malraux, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Maritain, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur or Primo Levi) arguing their relationship with the issue of Evil.En mayo de 2003 se celebró la duodécima edición de las «Conferencias Aranguren». Jorge Semprún dictó tres conferencias magistrales tituladas «Kant y la mochila del maquis», «El mal radical y las letrinas de Buchenwald» y «Literatura y memoria del mal: de Sartre a Paul Ricoeur», agrupadas todas ellas bajo el título genérico de Memoria del mal. El hilo conductor de las tres intervenciones fue la experiencia de Semprún como deportado político en el campo de concentración de Buchenwald, tan cercano al Weimar de Schiller y Goethe. Allí pudo experimentar el mal radical, pero también la fraternidad, a través de los grupos de resistencia antifascista que coordinaban en el campo los distintos grupos políticos clandestinos. Esta experiencia le sirvió para repasar las lecturas filosóficas que había realizado en su época de estudiante de Filosofía en la Sorbona, así como las que le interesaron una vez terminada la guerra. De esta forma, Semprún hizo un recorrido por distintos autores (Immanuel Kant, André Malraux, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Maritain, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur o Primo Levi) argumentando la relación de los mismos con el problema del mal

La estética del secreto en una novela de espionaje : La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader de Jorge Semprún

This paper examines a specific characteristic of spy novels, the aesthetics of secrecy, on the example of Jorge Semprún's La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader. An important aspect in the creation of an aesthetic of secrecy in the novel in question is the variation of the famous figure of the double. Ramón Mercader, the protagonist of the novel presents an interesting case of this, which will be analysed in the first part of this paper. The second part of the article points out the overruling organisation principle of the novel: the secret. The complex narratological and temporal structure of the novel obeys to the secret, which makes it the major formal principle of this text. The story does not only narrate secrets but the secret as a formal principle creates a text with plenty of voices and a complex temporal structure, contributing to the creation of an aesthetic of secrecy