José María Ridao

The dizzying speed with which a peaceful gathering of young people turned into a cruel coven had provided substance for a river of reflections on Martín's part; a river, exactly a river: reflections that had varied according to his age in the same way that a flow moves between lowland and mountain landscapes, changing along with them. José María Ridao's novel is a journey through the memory of its protagonists, a journey to childhood, a journey to the recollection of friendships and loves diluted over time, blurred like that profile of the African coast that can be glimpsed through the haze from the terrace of a harbor bar.

This novel presents the story of Martín, who, newly separated from his wife, embarks on a journey to Africa to discover his family's past—that which is only spoken of in a low voice. The plot mysteriously weaves together, and the protagonist will discover the sinister and true face of the only relative he admired: his grandfather Germán. In the face of utter disillusionment, a world free of ghosts will open up.

Through several stories distant in time, it narrates the disenchantment and loss of ideals to which characters who have intensely lived the dreams and longings typical of their respective eras will succumb. At the same time, the reader will gradually discover that, despite the apparent distance between the episodes, all of them form part of a closed universe—a single, tightly woven narrative in which events of recent history blend with intimate, everyday experiences. The traces of a dramatic past, the university world of the fifties, the lightheartedness of the following decades, and the beginning of a new era—all seen through youth romances and the disillusionments of maturity—make August in Paradise a text that casts a singular and paradoxical gaze upon our past and our own experiences, laden with implacable criticism and restrained nostalgia.

Excuses for Doctor Huarte combines an uncommon rigor in writing with a deeply personal sensitivity and outlook. The short stories that make up this book are invariably conceived from memory, from the awareness of a painful passage of time and the pressing need to reconstruct and make sense of one's own biography.

“The victor imagined that naming a street in Paris Malakoff would forever recall their victory, while the vanquished hoped that, over time, it would only evoke a place in Crimea where something must have happened.”José María Ridao

The aphorisms included in these Notebooks, written in Paris and distilled during the years José María Ridao has spent in New Delhi, unfold a world-view marked by irony, halfway between rational evidence that contradicts beliefs forged by tradition and an almost poetic intuition that reveals new and surprising dimensions of reality. The most common ideas about philosophy, history, freedom, art, literature, journalism, or politics are revisited in a work that, despite the fragmentary nature demanded by the genre, maintains a constant rhythm and a suggestive unity of purpose.

An essential essay on the roots of intolerance and its repercussions in current politics.

The author explores with immense lucidity various controversial aspects of Spanish historiography: the denial of the Muslim past, the consequences of the expulsion of Jews and Moriscos from Spain, the imposition of a retrogressive religious orthodoxy, the difficulties tolerance has faced in prospering in Spain, the weak roots of authentic liberalism, and the everlasting persecution of the dissident for the sake of a uniformity almost always imposed by force. All of this serves to establish an illuminating diagnosis of the country's complex social and political reality in the present day.

Inconsequential Democracy doesn't mean democracy without value, but rather democracy that doesn't seek refuge in transcendent truths established by philosophy, theology, or experimental science. Ultimately, it's democracy that aligns with a tradition of thought that refuses to resort to any non-human authority to justify conduct or claim a verdict. The arguments of this other tradition have nothing to do with the irrationalism or relativism it has been accused of, and are analysed in Inconsequential Democracy from a perspective that traverses its various manifestations throughout history, bringing together theologians like Nicholas of Cusa, philosophers like Dewey, and scientists like Heisenberg, all engaged in the effort to refute any determinism.

It is inconsequential because it rejects a kind of truth that ends up subjugating the individual and, in the eschatological struggle to prevail and establish an order, forces one to disregard both the harm inflicted and the sacrifice demanded.

The posthumous publication of The First Man in 1994 brought about a profound shift in the reception of Albert Camus's work, despite his reader support never wavering. In this book, José María Ridao investigates the deep and less-analyzed reasons for that transformation, but also—and above all—those aspects of Camus's literary and philosophical work where, beyond today's praise and admiration, self-serving clichés and erroneous interpretations still persist, which once served to dismiss him as an uneducated thinker and an author of 'pretty stories.' To this end, Ridao reveals the well-established philosophical tradition within which Camus's moral stances during the major crossroads of the 20th century gain true meaning, as well as the biographical factors and the rhetoric he employs to express himself—rhetoric far more tied to the problems of philosophical expression than to mere stylistic choices, as his detractors claimed.

With The Eloquent Void, Ridao warns against the sterile hagiography of Camus which, having rescued him from the limbo to which Sartre and the existentialists attempted to confine him, is now hindering the distinction between intellectual interest in a work and emotional devotion toward a man."

“...a precise and passionate book, intelligent and strangely intimate.” Albert Camus y el malentendido, Letras Libres, 24/02/2017

'Albert Camus, la mirada contemplativa', José Andrés Rojo, El País, 07/03/2017

In the early hours of June 7, 1525, after the Diet of Nuremberg decided to support the Lutheran Reformation, Albrecht Dürer—who had attended the meeting—suffered a terrifying nightmare. Freshly awake and drenched in sweat, he rushed to reproduce it in a watercolor, recording its meaning in a few lines written at the bottom of the image. For the first time in art history, a painter depicted the actual content of a dream rather than a figure dreaming, resulting in a timeless and chilling work—perhaps one of the most faithful representations of the fear experienced by the individual in the face of historical events.

With Dürer Dreaming, José María Ridao proposes taking the same path in reverse, beginning with the tumultuous history of the Reformation and ending at the moment the painter realizes the catastrophe in the making. To do so, Ridao establishes a subtle parallel with the combination of image and text in Dürer's work, offering, on the one hand, an innovative essayistic reflection on the causes of the Reformation—in which the conquest of the Indies played a decisive role—and, on the other, a dialogued fiction that attempts to recreate the emotional climate surrounding the painter's artistic output.

The result is an unclassifiable book in which, through the lens of past events, issues of renewed relevance emerge: the effects of corruption on the disintegration of societies, the function of art, and the inherently fallible nature of humankind.

5th Josep Palau i Fabre International Essay Prize

“At a time rife with thinkers doling out feed to the reading herd, and where the prevailing Panglosses dazzle the public with phrases like 'the weak vital density of the Visigoths' explaining our current DNA, a book like José María Ridao's is a welcome gift and a timely subject for reflection. His considerations regarding man and the Absolute, and the invention of the Absolute by man, encompass the various aspects of this abstraction—from the concept and proclamation of the universally valid to the exercise of the condign superiority it affords, all the way to basing the origin of Creation on a narrative that replaces rational language with a storytelling framework that must be believed implicitly, on pain of becoming an outcast in the eyes of whoever self-appoints as its spokesperson. His review of figures as disparate as Socrates, Saint Augustine, Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Proust is as innovative as it is stimulating. The lure of absolute truth, Ridao says, makes us forget that the truth uttered by human beings is always relative, and often subject to expiration.” — Juan Goytisolo

Review, Babelia, El País, 18/03/2015

If the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the failure of the communist utopia, the financial crisis that erupted in the West in 2007 impoverished millions of citizens while certifying the collapse of the conservative revolution spearheaded years earlier by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—a 'revolution' that dismantled the welfare state, left markets without state control, and weakened the work of international institutions, which became increasingly ineffective in the face of conflicts such as those that bloodied the Balkans, the former Soviet republics, or, more recently, the countries swept up in the so-called Arab Spring. José María Ridao denounces the myths of political messianism to which we have been subjected since the turn of the millennium and the attacks on the Twin Towers. In opposition to supposed economic ideals like extreme austerity, fiscal balance, and market deregulation—all carrying devastating consequences—the author claims an intellectual stance that does not hide behind false theoretical speculations to close its eyes to the suffering and misery of human beings dragged along by the whirlwinds of history.

The author invokes the thought of the philosopher of Rotterdam to address the problems of the present. Unexcused Peace, The Choice of Barbarism, and the remaining essays published for the first time in this volume denounce the falsification of history and analyze the roots of the myth that leads to proclaiming an era like our own as radically new. They open a line of reflection on the political role assigned to the concepts of culture and civilization. The author approaches this from the conviction that what truly matters is resisting, at every turn, the justification of the intolerable—and that the crisis we suffer today was bound to be all the more devastating precisely because the 'intolerable was being justified.

Taking the major events of history as a guiding thread for reflection, Ridao asserts the radicalism and freedom of thought by drawing from the most varied stimuli: from travels and conversations with writers and intellectuals to great artistic and literary works, including details as fine as a Romanesque capital, the frame of a Pissarro painting, the ruins of a church, or a collage from Berlin's underground culture.

The unique composition of this essay invites a swift journey through geography and across diverse realms of creation, thought, religion, science, history, and politics. This alert, all-encompassing gaze gradually reveals a fresh viewpoint and a different perspective on known facts, as well as on ideas and judgments that once seemed immutable.

The result is a book decisively in favor of the radicalism and freedom of thought and creation essential to our time—an era that tolerates neither doubt nor paralysis, and in which lucidity and courage are more necessary than ever.

In this book, José María Ridao examines a variety of literary figures: from Turgenev to Galdós, Orwell to Verne, Cervantes to Rabelais, Rodoreda to Marsé, and Azaña to Martín-Santos. Written with the author's characteristic acuteness, it is a stimulating essay on literature.

A substantial portion of European art and literature adheres to the rules of decorum—well-polished forms tailored to patterns validated by tradition and good taste. Yet another tradition exists, one that rebels against conventions. The result is an unsettling, unclassifiable art akin to a silence: a casing built from rubble hiding the statue of a god within. It creates a discord between an exterior that can be shameless, laughable, and grotesque, and an interior rich in wisdom. This tradition has suffered persecution, and even when its excellence ultimately prevailed, attempts were made to veil it behind interpretations that obscured its singularity and worth.

Whether recounting how the painted nude survived European decorum, demystifying critical trends that attempt to reduce Cervantes to a mere conduit for the national spirit, analyzing the formal irreverences of Sterne and Rabelais, the heterodoxy of Juan Goytisolo, or the provocations of a painter like Egon Schiele, José María Ridao exposes a frequently submerged current within European culture. He breaks a lance for those artists who did not hesitate to embrace imperfections and stray from conventional canons if it enabled them to push the boundaries of their creative expression—a defense that ultimately becomes a true praise of imperfection.

With precise prose, José María Ridao analyzes the drift of Western democracies tracing back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Guided by the conviction that describing reality is no easy endeavor, Weimar Among Us offers a timely warning against crude historical comparisons aimed at granting a veneer of legitimacy to decisions that—as evidenced by the Iraq War—ultimately reveal themselves as sordid baseness.

In the face of the world's harrowing panorama, the only path forward is to reclaim the role of reason and intelligence: that is, the necessity of questioning whether we are truly conscious of what we are doing.

The prestigious Israeli journalist Gabriel Stern relates that while patrolling an abandoned hospital in 1948 Jerusalem, he came face to face with an armed man. Terrified, Stern fired immediately—only to shatter a mirror that had reflected his own image: his fear had conjured an enemy, and he had rushed to shoot it down. In Unexcused Peace, José María Ridao brilliantly reflects on the processes through which enemies—and, by extension, borders—are constructed. For it is precisely from these constructs that geographical, national, religious, or racial boundaries are defined, and violence and war are unleashed and justified.

Immigration is without a doubt one of the most pressing issues facing Western societies today. Though a relatively recent phenomenon—particularly in Spain—it shows no signs of waning. Yet we stubbornly refuse to draw conclusions from what we witness here and from the experiences of neighboring countries. In this illuminating essay, José María Ridao offers a fresh perspective that unlocks the full complexity of the issue. Ridao critically examines the 'choice of barbarism' we are making—a choice that ignores fundamental realities: no one emigrates on a whim, and immigration presents a primary challenge above all for the immigrants themselves.

Against a certain idea of history holding that nothing of relevance occurred in Spain before 1800. Against the assumption that the past holds neither guilty nor innocent, neither executioners nor victims. Against a history that attempts to integrate Spain seamlessly into Europe, glossing over a past marked by leaders who all too often distinguished themselves only through corruption, abuse of power, and a penchant for discord. José María Ridao presents a history of Spain that breaks a lance in favor of the heterodox—those cast out of canonical history for their subversive nature (Jews like Ben Sahl, the Arabs of Al-Andalus, Erasmians, Enlightened thinkers)—in whom Spain's true European dimension is expressed, offering a far more accurate and complex portrait of national identity.

For there is no single narrative of history, 'and it falls upon historians to remember that their discipline is merely one version among infinite versions. The search for a historical basis for certain individual or collective rights requires forgetting that the boundary between past and present remains almost always insurmountable, no matter how stubbornly words—certain words and certain ways of using them—bodefully suggest otherwise.'

Addressing realities close to the reader and recent events, the texts collected in this volume illustrate the idea that any order—be it international, economic, or political—rests largely on conventions and collective illusions.

From this perspective, dedicated to detecting and dismantling the clichés that shape our perceptions and positions, José María Ridao undertakes an original and meticulous journey through some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as the situation in Africa, the conflicts in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, the retreat into identity within Islam or nationalist movements, globalization, and migratory phenomena.

Despite the strenuous efforts of these illusory orders to sustain themselves and endure, Ridao suggests that the only constant is disillusionment: the continuous, cyclical friction between reality and our image of it. In doing so, the author revalues a cultural lens on aspects of reality—such as the international, economic, and political spheres—that have frequently been excluded from its scope of reflection.

With his characteristic brilliant style, José María Ridao traverses in this travel book not only a geography, but also the history of Spain and the ideas and ideologies that underlie and clash in its recent political history. The title pays homage to Manuel Azaña, President of the Second Spanish Republic, who died in exile in the small French city of Montauban. Ridao reveals in these literary journeys how the Castilianist vision of Spain forged by the most illustrious authors of the Generation of '98 is offensive to the rest of the Spanish regions, and how its romantic idealism was resistant to development. The Passenger from Montauban is a lucid stance that confronts, through words, the conservatism of yesteryear and today's lightness and banality.