I recently asked Ferran Sáez about his relationship with spirituality, and he pointed to an inconspicuous window located high above the room we were in. It was a gray day, natural light weakening against the artificial, and on the windowsill was a sparrow taking advantage of the building's shapes to shelter from the rain. "I could put a barrier between what we're doing here and that sparrow, between me and the world, but I choose not to," he said. We were in an auditorium at the Casa de Convalescencia, a jewel of Catalan Baroque civil architecture that serves as the headquarters for the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, at the end of a symposium dedicated to celebrating Sáez as a "contemporary classic" and deepening our understanding of his work. After four hours of academic presentations, on the periphery of a bubble of human achievement, the rest of the world continued to spin with a labored and calm indifference. It's one of those images that makes you look at yourself from the outside, and in that shift in perspective, you consider the possibility that there's something genuinely important beyond yourself.
The question was public, and the audience smiled: anyone who knows Sáez a bit knows that these kinds of gestures define him well. In fact, it's not necessary to meet him in person: ARA readers will remember articles derived from the arrangement of the stars in the night sky at a particular time of year, from the qualities of light on particular autumn days, or from the music of Bach. These are the same readers who know that these poetic digressions contain not a drop of sugary sentimentality, but rather the seriousness that helps give weight and concreteness to the ideas. And they are also the same readers who, when they encounter scenes of beauty, already anticipate them as the prelude to an ironic counterpoint that will regain a certain degree of distance. This toppling and turning that respects the complexity of things while keeping them alive is responsible for the addictive pleasure of reading Sáez.
It may seem a little odd to ask an irrefutably modern intellectual about spirituality. A priori, Sáez's great theme is communication. Not in the sensationalist sense to which marketing rhetoric has degraded it, but in that of the root that derives from the verb communicate, which in Latin means to share either share (Reflecting on the etymology of words is also a typically Sáezian resource.) A university professor of those who dignify the institution, he taught me a class called Digital Agora, which I would say perfectly encapsulates a way of seeing that attempts to understand our times, focusing especially on the old and the most seemingly new. Like his beloved Montaigne, Sáez knows that communication is always a rehearsal, that is, an attempt to cross the abyss between two little heads that is always provisional and open to multiple possibilities of failure. Sáez's intellectual trajectory can be understood as an endless exercise in critiquing the forces that threaten the conditions of possibility of contemporary communication.
I highlight two of these forces contrary to public conversation with which Sáez has cultivated an intimate enmity over the years: one philosophical and global, and the other political and local. The first is "parodic postmodernism," an intellectual school of the second half of the 20th century that, according to Sáez, begins with a very subtle critique of the dogmas of modernity, but ends up degrading into a very dangerous intellectual fraud. The second is the Transition, as Spanish democracy has feet of clay because it is founded on forgetting the crimes and the genocidal logic of Franco's regime, particularly in terms of Catalan ethnic cleansing, instead of recognizing what happened. Sáez's corpus returns again and again to these two intellectual impostures that, in the name of progress and equality, have paved the way for new forms of domination and obscurantism.
But isn't spirituality a form of communication? Sáez has just published a short and exceptional book, Presence of an absence (Publications of the Abbey of Montserrat), where he argues that "the infinite contemporary forms of cult of emotion, the mindfulness, yoga disconnected from its origins, "personal growth" with spiritual touches, etc." have a vocation for immanence, while the spirituality that interests him is connected with transcendence "in the sense of non-immanence, not a simple synonym disguised as a countess." social structures and historical facts that cannot be reversed by interpretation.
