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Abstract
This article examines Eugenio Trías's reading of the esthetics and politics of Joan Maragall. Trías uses Maragall as an occasion to articulate his theory of a Catalan civil society based on the figure of Catalunya-ciutat. My text traces the main components of this articulation and relates them to two general problematics: the contemporary withering of civil society, and the ontology of being. I pay special attention to Trías's identification of Maragall's opposition between homeland and city with Martin Heidegger's distinction between Earth and World. My general hypothesis is that the civil society of Catalunya-ciutat is no longer a viable social project and must be replaced by the postcivil design of Catalunya-estat.
Notes
1. Translations from Catalan are mine. Also, thanks to Javier Krauel for his comments on a previous draft.
2. See “Elogi del poble” in Maragall I 683–89, and also his article “Preparad los caminos” in Maragall II: 755–57.
3. For more on the Tragic Week, see Ullman; Marín; and Ealham. For an excellent study of Maragall's position vis-à-vis the events, see Benet.
4. I borrow the term “utopia poètica” ‘poetic utopia’ from Mora 31.
5. For studies of Maragall's literary and religious theories, see, respectively, Quintana i Trias and Moreta.
6. For a previous reflection on forgiveness, see Trías's El lenguaje del perdón.
7. This observation contests Ortega y Gasset's famous thesis on the “España invertebrada.” While Ortega attributes the dismembering of Spain to the lack of an imperial state and of social leaders (or what he calls “los mejores” [125]), Trías believes that it is caused by the lack of a productive civil society like Catalonia's.
8. See Murgades, “Assaig” 42.
9. While Alomar was a classicist poet who embraced noucentisme, he was soon ostracized because he remained an anticlerical Republican and refused to endorse the conservative postulates of the Lliga. See Marfany, Aspectes 253–65, and also Marfany, “Naixement.”
10. Solidaritat Catalana was the political coalition of all Catalan parties (except for Alejandro Lerroux's Partido radical) that was formed in 1906 against the anti-Catalanism of the state. Solidaritat represented a further consolidation of political Catalanism beyond its stages as a literary and social movement. Thus, the coalition embodied the step up from Alomar's “raw” solidarity to d'Ors political solidarity.
11. For d'Ors's idea of the city, see Murgades's “Eugeni d'Ors.”
12. Trías develops the concept of “arquetipo” as synthesis of symbol and idea in Filosofía del futuro 169–74.
13. These proclamations naturally reverse the fascist principles of La Falange, in particular point two of its 1937 decree: “España es una unidad de destino en lo universal” (Díaz-Plaja 350).
14. For an analysis of Pasqual Maragall's municipal politics, see McNeill.
15. For Hegel, civil society is composed of three parts: the system of individual needs, the administration of justice that guarantees the protection of property, and the corporation and the police that ensure the provision of the common interest. See Hegel (220–74, §182–256).
16. In El lenguaje del perdón, we can see this interlacing between ontology and morality in relation to action. Since “toda acción, por finita, es culpable y pecaminosa,” the only possible redemption is by “asumiendo el juicio externo del otro sobre uno mismo, [e] interiorizando el juicio en forma de conciencia de culpa” (227). The next step after becoming conscious of guilt is to ask for forgiveness and consummate an act of love. For further studies on Trías’ philosophy of the limit, see Martínez-Pulet; Sánchez Pascual and Rodríguez Tous; and Muñoz and Martín.
17. In “Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State,” Marx explains how Hegel's conception of the state aims to incorporate and deactivate the antagonisms of civil society. Marx's key point is that the internal contradiction of the legislature of the state, which determines that constitutional power needs a power of the constitution that is previous and that “extends beyond the constitution” (117), is in fact a transposition onto the state of the separation between the state and civil society. This contradiction reveals that the separation between the state and civil society cannot be overcome by turning the classes of the latter into “the particular moments of the political state” (144).
18. For neoliberalism and globalization, see Harvey; Sassen.
19. See also Marx, Capital 1019–49.
20. The question of the Earth is also crucial in Maragall's “El comte Arnau.” See Trías, Pensamiento 48–55.
21. 21.See collective Pau i Treva: www.pauitreva.cat.