Crisis and tragedy in the Baroque. About Gracián, Cervantes and Hispanic American Neobaroque.

Abstract

This study analyses the link between the Hispanic Baroque and the tragic spirit. According to the author, the tragic is formulated as a tension between facticity and ideality, equivalent to the tension that exists between “all” and “nothing”. The world is both in unison: all, because the total unity of the difference that constitutes it is founded on the infinite-divine; and nothing, because that all has taken refuge in the infinite divine. The tragic, according to the author, is linked to the philosophical figure of a “presence of the absent”, the way in which the infinite appears in the finite. The baroque crisis lies in this tragic fissure and, by virtue of it, in the struggle of the human being against unavailable powers that reduce the differential being of the world to an empty identity of it with itself. The author distinguishes between the model of moral tragedy (Gracián) and that of the tragedy of freedom (Cervantes’s Don Quixote). It is the latter that reverberates in the Hispanic American Neo-Baroque, argues the author.