Reflexión acerca del arte y la política.

1. Is there pure Art?

2. Culture and politics
“I do not believe, as I comfortably could have
believed in some other time, that the literature of
mere imaginative creation is enough to feel I have
done right as a writer, since my notion of such a
literature has changed and comprises on it the
conflict between the individual fulfillment as it was
understood by humanism, and the collective
fulfillment as understood by socialism…
(…)it is no longer possible to respect, as he was
respected in other times, the writer who sheltered
on a misunderstood liberty of turning his back on
his own human sign, on his poor and wonderful
condition of man among men, of privileged one
among the pauper and tormented people…

3. Culture and politics
(…) every intellectual, nowadays, potentially or
effectively belongs to the third world for his sole
vocation is a danger, a menace, a scandal for the
ones who slowly but certainly hold the finger on the
trigger of the bomb…
(…) a writer worthy of such a name cannot go back to
his books as if nothing had happened, he cannot
continue writing with the comfortable feeling that
his mission is accomplished in the mere exercise of
a vocation of novelist, or poet, or dramatist”.
Julio Cortázar
About the situation of the Latin-American intellectual
Saignon, 1967, May 10

4. Culture and politics
 Schopenhauer: essentially ascetic view of
the purpose of art… suppression of desire
emerged from will: Vincent van Gogh in
the madhouse
 Sartre: committed literature… writing is a
form of acting in the world; it produces
effects for which the author must assume
responsibility… rejection of "art for art's
sake"

6. Bibliography
Cortázar, J. (1967, May 10). Acerca de la situación del intelectual
latinoamericano. In Último Round. II. (1969). (p 278). México:
Siglo XXI editors
Jean-Paul Sartre (2004, April 22). Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy. Available [online] 2007, November 12 at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#6
Drummond, J. (nd). Orlan (France). Available [online] 2007,
November 12 at: http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm