Maria Zambrano: To be Alive in Death

Maria Zambrano did not think of death as end of life, but rather as "genuine life". She understood it as instants of radical loss that the subject lives through in a limit-experience which she herself characterized as one of being cast away or "shipwrecked". The article addresses the dialectical relation between life and death seen as complementary poles in Maria Zambrano's metaphysics. There is no life without death, she says, for being emerges from nothingness. When it feels being, the subject initiates a dying which is an "awakening" of the creative love it received in the origin of life. Death is a source of hope and wisdom for whom accepts its presence.