Tomás Segovia, a left on the margin

Abstract

The paper explores the conception of the political left of the writer Tomás Segovia (Spain, 1927 - Mexico 2011). Segovia is part of the so-called children of the Spanish exile of 1939; his political ideas are marked by the experience of exile. From that childhood experience, he produces an extraordinary poetic and essayistic work. His political reflections arise from a particular idea of uprootedness, not in the distorted sense that the term acquires in a globalized world; on the contrary, uprootedness is seen as the result of a critique of all identity or nationalistic claims. From this general conception, Segovia addresses different problematic issues of the politics of the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, such as representative democracy, institutional politics, the nature of power and the critique of the idea of progress. A conception of the left with these characteristics can be qualified as “marginal” insofar as it does not belong to a political movement or party. A review of the Latin American left is incomplete if we fail to take into account the expressions that remain on the margins of academic and ideological discussion.