“Death is close enough not to fear life.” “The existence of God is perhaps the best reason not to believe in him.” “Will I be good enough to think of others in my last moments? In those that I leave more of the fucking afterlife that I dive into? These are some of the ironic reflections dedicated to life that Xavier Rubert de Ventos collected over the years in more than a hundred notebooks and with which he built his book. If I don’t run, I fall In 2017. Today the philosopher from Barcelona, a prominent figure in Catalan public life since the late sixties, has died at the age of 83 in a hospital in the Catalan capital, leaving behind an idea always linked to daily existence , as a comprehensive work on Spanish and European parliamentarianism with the PSC of his childhood friend Pascal Maragoll – as a result of the experience he would write courtier and his ghost-, and a much bigger job as a teacher since 1973 as Adjunct Professor of Aesthetics at the School of Architecture.
With a humor and sharpness that is the enemy of any seriousness, as a writer he was one of the greatest essayists in Catalan with books such as sensitivity theoryPublished in 1968, in the midst of the dictatorship, and would act in the country’s intellectual debate from the founding of the Col.legi de Filosofia in 1976 with Eugenio Trice or Jordi Llovate, until their final approach to the state of independence in the last decade Was. With the argument that those who defined themselves as Hispanic, such as Colombians or Peruvians, did not want to maintain the current type of relationship that Catalonia maintained with Spain.
Rupert de Ventos at the 2015 Dyda performance
Rupert de Ventos, father of four children, among them the painter Gino Rupert (1969)—the fruit of his relationship with the Mexican psychoanalyst and writer Magda Catala—and the novelist Zita Rupert (1996), whose mother was the writer Luisa Castro, in Barcelona in 1939 He was born in and has said that since he was young he wanted to be a footballer, a doctor and in addition to being a father of many children. He explained that his uncle, the editor Joan Teixidore, had told him that when he was thirty he might be an athlete nearing retirement or a young philosopher. In 1961 he graduated in law in Barcelona and later completed his philosophy degree in Madrid, where he would have José Luis López Aranguran as a teacher. He received his doctorate in 1965 with the thesis “The Aesthetics of Abstraction”. In his youth he was, like Pascal Maragoll, a member of the clandestine front Obre Catala, which would lead to various arrests and even a brief exile towards the end of the dictatorship.
In 1976, together with Eugenio Trois, Jordi Llovate and Josep Ramoneda, he founded the Col·legi de Filosofia de Barcelona, free access conferences that renewed the discipline. by then he had published his sensitivity theory, in which he reflected on how avant-garde art had introduced a new sensibility in which aesthetics no longer explained everything and social context was increasingly important but often did not abandon forms inherited from the Renaissance. Nevertheless, a new art was born and he pointed out that Renaissance art flowed, morphed, and died in the included art. He would also create the Barcelona-New York Chair of Catalan Language and Culture (1979) and participate in the creation of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Barcelona Institute of the Humanities.
Professor at Harvard or Berkeley, he tended to have a philosophy “closely connected to daily life”.
A professor at Harvard, Cincinnati or Berkeley, he claimed to have always gravitated towards a philosophy “closely related to daily life”, which was “a middle ground between a fascination with what we do not know and an overly complex I was not trying to drown in. Abstraction, an organic philosophy that is conscious of being part of a whole that transcends it. Philosophy became almost a theology in the 19th century. try harder.”
Pascal Maragoll and Javier Folch at the presentation of a book by Rubert de Ventos
Between 1982 and 1986 he would be a deputy in Congress and from 1986 to 1994 a European Parliamentarian with the PSC. In the continental parliament, he will campaign for the Mies van der Rohe Architecture Award. Largest in the European Union. Nevertheless, during the process, he would support the CUI’s candidacy for the Parliament of Catalonia in 2012 and lay the foundation for a non-nationalist independence movement that he had already considered. The Labyrinth of Hispanicity (Mirror Prize of Spain in 1987), a comparative study of Hispanic and Anglo-Saxon colonialism in which he defended the ambiguous and ambiguous Spain by María Zambrano, against the traditional image of an imperative and unified Spain. An idea of Hispanicity without so much historical subject matter and lived more by those who were its objects. and a scathing analysis of what the author called the ‘shadowy legend’ of the conquest: caquiquismo, coups and its legacy of corruption.
He was the author of a truly great essay work and already in 1963 he won the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize self-absorbed art, Thief aesthetics and its heresies (1974) would receive the Anagram Essay in 1973 and would be the capital of Of modernity. critical philosophy essay, He would also write enlightening works like Why philosophy? (1983) and other policies like Catalonia: from identity to independence (1999).
