Original Language: Catalan and Spanish
Títutulu Original: The passion of strangers / The passion of strangers
Year of publication: 2025
Valoración: Between recommended and highly recommended
Throughout my life I have always had a marked interest in those areas related to the knowledge of oneself but also about the world around us, being philosophy a discipline that markedly covers these objectives approaching them in a rational way. But of course, the depth that we often find in the texts of this field can assume a stumbling block to whom he intends to approach them. Luckily, Marina Garcés knows how to fit her didactic vocation with the extensive knowledge she grants and the result is a book accessible mostly as well as extremely interesting.
Despite a title that can lead to some confusion, the essay deals with friendship, from its meaning from past times to its current conception. Already in the prologue the author confesses a certain suspicion of the typical concept of friendship stating that “the trust and comfort with which many people refers to her friends awakens me an alarm that I do not know if it is a sign of suspicion or envy.” A suspicion that is based on his perception that “friendship is a space of relationships as disturbing as fearsome, affected by a desire and fear that escape what we can call: the desire to be loved because yes and the fear of not being.” With this, says the author that “this book intends to travel the margins of writing about friendship, touring her conceptual threads, but also entering her gaps.”
In his analysis of friendship, Garcés affirms that friendship is being reduced to the “therapeutic remedy condition: lifeguard of an orphan life and refuge of a threatened life. After years giving all possible spin to love, couple and sexual intercourse, friendship appears in the media, the sections of psychology of the newspapers, to the websites of self -help and in academic research such as the magical potion that can cure all the evils of this time in which we live: loneliness and discomfort »and this goes against the genuine nature of friendship, because« friends do not exist as a friend means for an end, but are precisely those unique beings that we love for themselves. They do not respond to any productive or reproductive capacity that justifies them »so that friendship relationships are not associated with any function or subordinate to any purpose,” friendship is a very precious good precisely because what matters to us of it is not reduced to its usefulness or the benefits that friends can provide us. ” Therefore, it recounts in this basic and unnegotiable premise: “If friendship is defined as that affective relationship that cannot have any other end than herself, if it is a love that must be kept free of any form of need, only those that can be considered free in this sense can aspire to be perfectly friends.” Therefore, «all relationships that imply dependence, emotional or material, are enemies of friendship because they question both the freedom on which the exercise of virtue and the reciprocity between equals are based. Friendship, and this is the third constant, is the love of the freedom of the other. It is commitment, but not obligation ».
The author thus traces a marked land for essay and displays her reflections in a diaphanous way and with an exhibition vocation. Anyway, as happens in every essay, there are more interesting parts than others, as well as there are more accessible moments than others and I must recognize that the book loses its appeal when it abandons the idea of friendship that we can commonly have to explain its evolution through history and its meaning through religion or philosophy. There it enters a more complex terrain than by concept or belief (or lack of) becomes more swampy and enrolled; They are paragraphs in which Garcés talks about friendship exhibiting his wide intellectual background and deepens vertically in its meaning through the thesis of San Tomás de Aquinas, Agustín de Hipona, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt or Aristotle. Anyway, overcome that light “bump” by historical analysis, the author focuses on how friendship influences us as people, such as the relationships we have affect us and make us become aware of our way of being thus as of themselves in different contexts than those of the individuality of the closed relationship they promptly suppose. Thus, part of the misgivings indicated at the beginning, they are based when launching the following reflection: «How many times have we been able to feel that the new friends of our relatives, or even our friends, exercise some kind of spell on them that does not leave us calm or even, from which we suspect? In the same way, it can be violent to see the behavior of a friend with other friends because it appears to us as a stranger. Not only mimics other social gestures, habits or ways of speaking that distance us. What is disturbing is that we see another person appear in someone we thought we knew ».
The author affirms that “the passion for the friend or friend, the passion between friends, is not the desire for what the other is, but the inclination for her way of being in the world”; Perhaps that is why we love them while causing us some envy and because also, in the background, they serve as counterpoint and mirror through which (car) question. Therefore, it asserts that “we know each other and do not know through friends” and I cannot agree with it more: it is through conversations and relationships with our friends where (re) we know our personality, our affinities and fears, but also the mental and emotional pillars and structures that support our being. It is in those relationships that we feel safe sometimes and in sometimes we notice that we anxiety because there are always certain unexplored land; Anyway, and despite this, it is in those few friends and the attraction they generate where we seek a harmonious balance between the comfort of the known and the distrust of the strange.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2025/03/marina-garces-la-pasion-de-los-extranos.html
