María Zambrano

María Zambrano Alarcón was born on April 22, 1904 in Vélez-Málaga, Spain, daughter of Blas Zambrano, friend and collaborator of Antonio Machado, and Araceli Alarcón. Both of Zambrano's parents as well as her paternal grandfather were teachers. In 1908, the family moved to Madrid and a year afterwards to Segovia, where her father obtained a job as Spanish literature professor. In 1911, María's sister, Araceli Zambrano was born, who became a very important figure in her life. In 1913, María Zambrano began to study philosophy in the Institute of Segovia, where she was one of only two female students. ^[1]

In 1924, the Zambrano family moved to Madrid, where María began to study in the department of Philosophy and Letters in the University. She studied under and was influenced by the philosophers José Ortega y Gasset and Xavier Zubiri. In 1927, Zambrano was invited to the "tertulia" of the Revista de Occidente, a circle in which she mediated between Ortega y Gasset and young writers such as Antonio Sánchez Barbudo and José Antonio Maravall. She also made many friends in the intellectual circles of the Generation of '27 movement including Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, and Miguel Hernández.

In 1928, Zambrano began her PhD studies on Spinoza, became part of the Federación Universitaria Escolar (FUE), and started writing in the Madrid newspaper El Liberal. She participated in the founding of the "League of Social Education," and taught classes in the Instituto Escuela. During this period, Zambrano began to write her first essays and articles, which show a strong interest in philosophy, literature and art, and begin to develop a style of writing characterized by its philosophical depth and creativity with language.

In 1931, Zambrano was named an assistant professor in the Universidad Central of Madrid where she taught History of Philosophy until 1935. She also integrated into the Republican-socialist coalition and actively campaigned for the Second Spanish Republic, attending the proclamation of the Republic in the Puerta del Sol on April 14, 1931. However, disillusioned with the realities of party politics, she declined the possibility of becoming an MP and refused further participation in party politics. Between 1932 and 1934, Zambrano participated in the Misiones Pedagógicas, teaching literacy, history and Spanish literature in villages in rural parts of the country.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Zambrano openly sided with the Republic and consequently went into exile after its defeat in 1939.

After living in France, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Italy, France again and Switzerland, Zambrano finally returned to Madrid in 1984, almost nine years after the death of Franco.

She died on 6 February 1991 in Madrid and was buried in the cemetery of her hometown Vélez-Málaga.

María Zambrano’s thought is characterized by a profound effort to reconcile philosophical reason with human lived experience. She critiques the rationalist tradition within Western philosophy, which, in her view, had neglected essential dimensions of human existence, such as emotion, imagination, intuition, poetry, and dreams. Some of Zambrano’s most important philosophical influences and interlocutors include Plato, Aristotle, the pre-Socratics, Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl and Ortega y Gasset.

Zambrano’s most famous contribution to the history of ideas is a philosophical method called “poetic reason,” which draws from a double root in the Greek logos (reason) and poiesis (creation). Through poetic reason, Zambrano does not reject rationality but rather, aims to expand it. The seminal text for poetic reason is Zambrano's book Claros del bosque [Forest clearings].

Another central aspect of her thought is the search for identity and being, particularly through the experience of exile, which marked her own life. Exile, in Zambrano’s philosophy, becomes not only a historical condition but also an ontological human state of being always in transit, in search of one’s place. Zambrano explores the theme of exile in her 1967 book, The Tomb of Antigone [La tumba de Antígona], a philosophical-literary reimagination of the figure of Antigone.

In her political theory, Zambrano writes on democracy and liberalism. She critiques liberalism when it becomes an abstract system of rights detached from human life and ethical responsibility, and in her 1930 book The Horizon of Liberalism [Horizonte del liberalismo] searches for a “new horizon” for liberalism. In her 1958 book Persona y democracia [Person and Democracy], she searches for an ethical foundation for democracy, defining it as a society in which one must truly be a person—a being recognized in their dignity, responsibility, and relational existence. For Zambrano, democracy is not only political organization but also a collective project rooted in ethical engagement.

Due to her long exile, Zambrano's genius was slow to be recognized. In Spain, due to the environment of the Franco regime, it was not until 1966 that one of the first articles on Zambrano was published: J. L. Aranguren's article "Los sueños de María Zambrano" (The Dreams of María Zambrano) in the important cultural and scientific Revista de Occidente, founded by Ortega y Gasset, a review to which leading contemporary philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Edmund Husserl contributed.

In 1981, Zambrano was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Communications and Humanities in its first edition, and in 1983 Malaga University named her Doctor honoris causa.

In 1988, Zambrano became the first woman to be awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish language.

María querida (Dearest Maria), a film directed by José Luis García Sánchez in 2004, is about her life.

In December 2007, when the Madrid-Málaga high-speed rail line was opened, railway company RENFE renamed Málaga railway station María Zambrano. Likewise, the central library of her alma mater, the Complutense University of Madrid was named after her. In 2017 the Segovia City Council unanimously approved to declare her an adopted daughter of the city. The campus of the Universidad of Valladolid in Segovia is named after her as well.

Selected primary literature

• Horizonte del liberalismo (Horizon of Liberalism) (1930).
• Hacia un saber del alma (1934).
• Filosofía y poesía (Philosophy and Poetry) (1940).
• La agonía de Europa (The Agony of Europe) (1945).
• Hacia un saber sobre el alma (Towards a Knowledge of the Soul) (1950).
• El hombre y lo divino (Man and the Divine) (1955).
• Persona y democracia (Person and Democracy) (1959).
• España, sueño y verdad (Spain, dream and truth) (1965).
• La tumba de Antígona (Antigone's Tomb) (1967).
• Claros del bosque (1977).
• De la aurora (1986).
• Los bienaventurados (1979).
• El pensamiento vivo de Séneca (1941).
• El sueño creador (1965).
• Los sueños y el tiempo (reissued in 1998).
• El reposo de la luz (1986).
• Para una historia de la piedad (Towards a history of charity) (1989).
• Delirio y destino (written in 1953; published in 1989), translated by Carol Maier, with a commentary by Roberta Johnson, Delirium and Destiny: A Spaniard in Her Twenties (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
• Unamuno (written in 1940; published in 2003).
• Cartas de la Pièce. Correspondencia con Agustín Andreu (2002).
• Islas (Islands) (Ed. Jorge Luis Arcos) (2007).

Secondary literature:

• Bush, Andrew. "María Zambrano and the Survival of Antigone," diacritics 34 (3–4) (2004): 90–111.
• Caballero, Beatriz. "La centralidad del concepto de delirio en el pensamiento de María Zambrano," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies (12) (2008): 89–106.
• Caballero Rodríguez, Beatriz. María Zambrano: A Life of Poetic Reason and Political Commitment. Cardiff: University of Wales Press (2017).
• Special Issue: María Zambrano In Dialogue. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 16. 4
• Ros, Xon. The Cultural Legacy of María Zambrano. Cambridge: Legenda (2017).
• Källgren, Karolina Enquist. María Zambrano’s Ontology of Exile: Expressive Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan Cham (2019).

• Claire Buck (ed.), Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (1992)
• Caballero Rodríguez, Beatriz, María Zambrano: A Life of Poetic Reason and Political Commitment (Wales University Press, 2017).