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Quiet Happiness: Pain, Memory, and the Judgment of Life in Dostoevsky- (2025 in Retrospect)

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Note: This text was originally written in Spanish and is presented here in English translation. Introduction Happiness rarely presents itself as a sharply defined event. In most lives, it neither bursts forth nor announces itself; instead, it accompanies the ordinary course of existence in a discreet manner. While pain leaves marks, demands attention, and imprints itself upon memory, happiness often passes silently, as a background condition that sustains without imposing itself. When human beings turn their gaze back upon their own history, they tend to recognize with precision what wounded them, yet struggle to identify those moments when life was, quite simply, in balance. This mismatch between lived experience and retrospective judgment, already formulated in Antiquity, runs through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. It allows us to think of happiness not as the absence of suffering, but as something that, precisely because it does not demand to be named, ends up being forgotten....
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The Museum Is Not Quite a Place… and Not Just a Non-Place Either

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The Ishtar Gate. AI image Introduction Museums seem immune to suspicion. Unlike airports or shopping malls, they announce themselves as spaces of culture, memory, and preservation. They promise history, meaning, depth, and yet, once you stop thinking about what a museum claims to be and pay attention to how it is actually experienced, a question quietly emerges: what kind of space is this, really? People enter, follow a path, pause briefly, and move on. They share a space without forming a group. They remain silent together. They are present, but only temporarily. In these basic features, the venue begins to resemble what the anthropologist Marc Augé famously called a non-place : spaces of transit such as airports, highways, and hotel chains, environments designed for circulation rather than dwelling. The comparison is tempting. But it doesn’t quite hold. A Space Built for Movement Walk through most museums and you’ll feel it immediately: the gentle pressure to keep moving....
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From Non-Places to Non-Places of Communication: Marc Augé and the Digital Irruption

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Identity and Human Rights, Marc Augé. AI image Introduction When Marc Augé published Non-Places in 1995, he offered one of the most influential accounts of what he termed supermodernity. Airports, highways, and shopping malls embodied an experience of the world shaped by transit, anonymity, and contractual logic. More than two decades later, in 2016, Augé delivered the keynote lecture Identity and Human Rights at the ENAH. The temporal gap is far from insignificant: by then, the world was already deeply permeated by the internet. Yet the digital does not occupy the center of his exposition. Instead, it appears—significantly—in the questions raised by the audience. This displacement is not incidental. In that final exchange, the concept of the non-place is pushed onto new terrain: that of contemporary communication. There, under the pressure of the present, thought is compelled to reformulate itself. The Non-Place in 1995: Space and Circulation In Non-Places , Augé defines these...
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The Second Fieldwork: Return and Signification in Marc Augé

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Introduction: Return as a Problem In his lecture The Ethnologist and the Tourist , Marc Augé offers an observation that may easily go unnoticed alongside more visible distinctions, such as the one he draws between the traveler and the field researcher: “ I have often observed that the second fieldwork is always richer than the first. ” Read superficially, the remark seems to refer to methodological refinement or the gradual accumulation of experience. Considered more carefully, however, it points toward something more decisive: a particular conception of the temporality of knowledge and the production of meaning. This article proposes to read that statement not as an empirical observation, but as a theoretical figure. The “second fieldwork” does not designate merely a return to the field, but a logic of return that traverses anthropological practice, writing, and signification. From this perspective, Augé’s remark can be reread through a double lens: Saussurean linguistics and Laca...
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The Second Fieldwork: Borders and Freedom in Marc Augé

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The horizon marks humanity’s first frontier. Augé Introduction: Rethinking the Border Beyond the Wall “It is not about abolishing or sacralizing borders, but about learning to inhabit them”. Rodo  In The Ethnologist and the Tourist (see link below), Marc Augé addresses a series of distinctions that quietly shape his reflection on the contemporary world: travel and displacement, observation and consumption, proximity and distance. Among these, the notion of the border occupies a crucial place, even if it does not always appear as a central concept. In a context marked by globalization, accelerated mobility, and the tightening of geopolitical boundaries, Augé proposes an interpretation that distances itself both from the discourse of security and from the fantasy of a world without borders. As it emerges in his lecture, the border is not reduced to a device of exclusion or a line of closure. Rather, it functions as a relational figure that allows us to think about contact, tra...
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Jung’s Zarathustra: Archetype, Destiny, and the Self

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Introduction Nietzsche was not merely a philosopher; Thus Spoke Zarathustra constitutes a singular manifestation of psychic contents of extraordinary intensity. Jung, for his part, approached the work as a clinical and archetypal phenomenon in a seminar conducted between 1934 and 1939. For Jung, Zarathustra is not a conventional literary character but an irruption of the Self, capable of mobilizing unconscious energies that the author’s conscious ego cannot fully sustain. This article examines how Jung interprets the Dionysian eruption in Nietzsche, the attendant risk of psychic disintegration, and the symbolic function that makes individuation possible. The central thesis is that, although Zarathustra embodies a remarkable affirmation of life, its emergence without sufficient archetypal containment leads to a psychic danger that Jung analyzes with both clinical precision and philosophical depth. Nietzsche and the Archetypal Eruption Jung approached Zarathustra as a text in whi...
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The Failed Integration: Jung and Nietzsche in the Seminar on Zarathustra

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Jung and Nietzsche, Degas-inspired. AI-generated image. Objective To analyze Jung’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a paradigmatic case of interaction between archetype, consciousness, and psychic disintegration, drawing primarily on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar and other relevant works by Carl Gustav Jung. Introduction Over many years, Carl Gustav Jung devoted sustained and meticulous attention to Friedrich Nietzsche, regarding his case as one of the most significant for understanding the relationship between archetype, consciousness, and psychic disintegration. His most extensive engagement is found in the seminar Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar (1934–1939), published posthumously in two volumes. In this work, Jung approaches Nietzsche neither as a philosopher nor as a literary figure, but as a psychological phenomenon in which symbolic expression reveals extreme tensions between the archetypal unconscious and the ego’s capacity to contain it. ...
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El Zaratustra de Jung: arquetipo, destino y el Sí-mismo

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Introducción Nietzsche no fue solo filósofo; su obra Así habló Zaratustra constituye una manifestación singular de contenidos psíquicos de enorme potencia. Jung, por su parte, abordó esta obra como un fenómeno clínico y arquetípico, en un seminario prolongado entre 1934 y 1939. Para él, Zaratustra no es un personaje literario convencional, sino una irrupción del Sí-mismo, capaz de movilizar energías inconscientes sin que el yo consciente del autor pueda sostenerlas plenamente. Este artículo explora cómo Jung interpreta la irrupción dionisíaca en Nietzsche, el riesgo de desintegración y la función simbólica que hace posible la individuación. La tesis central sostiene que, aunque Zaratustra encarna una afirmación vital extraordinaria, su manifestación sin contención arquetípica suficiente conduce a un peligro psíquico que Jung analiza con atención clínica y filosófica. Nietzsche y la irrupción arquetípica Jung abordó Zaratustra como un texto donde lo arquetípico emerge de manera...
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