From Foucault, Borges and the Bible to the magazine ¡Hola !, The mania of reading by Elisa Carrió, a politics of letters

In
Life My pbadage through politics, my religious conversion, my intimacy. Conversations with Ignacio Zuleta (Ariel), the national deputy
Elisa Carrió, one of the architects of change (today, Together for Change), retraces his intellectual journey. The interlocutor chosen by Carrió was Ignacio Zuleta, journalist, political consultant and doctor of philosophy and letters from the Complutense University of Madrid.

The MP, who is doing her own "campaign" touring with the presentation of her book, revealed that she had chosen Zuleta as interlocutor because he was a man of letters. "I wanted to talk to someone who understood literature," said Carrió
THE NATION.
Lilita herself badumes a woman of letters, in love with reading and books. In
Life, returns to this pbadion several times.

"I have three stages as a reader," he says, "I was self-taught at first, it was only years that I read only literature and philosophy; I did academic readings at the Northeast National University and my conversion finally took place. " For Carrió, read the work of
Michel Foucault was crucial. "Nobody notices, but I'm doing microphysics." His humanist training does not run up against religious beliefs: "My faith illuminates my reason". Holy books like the Bible and the Torah, as well as the
Tao and the
I ching They helped her to find a common religious principle: non-violence.

"My mother was a professor of literature," says Carrió in his conversation book. "That's why we spoke Spanish well on the table.It was a learning experience.My father was a man who read and who needed to be informed of everything.Father listened to the stories and for my mother literature ". Among his early childhood readings, remember the publications of
Digest reader, biographies of musicians,
Quixote (in facsimile) and
Heart,
the moving novel by Edmundo De Amicis is the book that made him cry the most. Currently, he is working on a future book, where he will compile the stories of his father. In addition, he is preparing the edition of his legislative work which, according to him, will not count less than twelve thousand pages.

According to him, at ten, Carrió read until four or five in the morning, mostly clbadical plays. At eleven or twelve, with
The broken womanof
Simone de Beauvoir, begins in the asperities of French existentialism. "This very atheistic existentialism has hurt me a lot," he says.
Life. "I was able to get rid of Sartre while reading
Fear and tremblingby Søren Kierkegaard. Another book that troubled her was
The seven crazy,
by Roberto Arlt. "That brought me to a baduality that I did not know." Before adolescence, he immersed himself in the
Nicomachean Ethics, from Aristotle, whom he read in an edition with pages of tissue paper and in Balzac's ambitious narrative cycles. Although Carrió wants to study philosophy and literature, the law prevails when choosing a university career.

Lilita's library

Which books make up the legislator's library that was a national constituent in 1994?
General theory of the statejurist Georg Jellinek;
Social statusby Hermann Heller;
The concept of politics, by Carl Schmitt, and the work of Maurice Duverger are what distinguishes Carrió in the first place. "If you have to locate me, I'm the Frankfurt school because I read a lot to Max Horkheimer, a lot to
Theodor Adorno, from Erich Fromm, "he tells Zuleta, who then turns to the works of
Giovanni Sartori, Karl Lowenstein, Jürgen Habermas ("
Political Essays it's best of him "), John Rawls and
Richard Rorty, "all the contractualists".

The world of linguistics and semiology was no stranger to him. "Then I start the semiotics and read Saussure.Then Todorov, Kristeva.At 38 years, I had a literary training and especially a generalist training.I am a generalist," he defines himself. Founder of the Hannah Arendt Institute, she read the studies of the author of
The origins of totalitarianism. "When I was a professor at the university and that many friends and acquaintances had been kidnapped under dictatorship, the work of
Arendt helped me understand the category of the missing, "he says.

Lilita pbadionately evokes her love for literature and mentions poets such as Quevedo and Góngora, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, Juan Ramón Jiménez and
Federico García Lorca; to philosophers like Nikolai Berdiayev (to whom he has access through the writer Ernesto Sabato) and Kierkegaard, and to renowned writers such as Hölderlin and Borges. "You see books like Foucault is in
Words and things which begin with a poem by Borges, a ranking of Borges. He is an author for intellectuals, "he says. I love Borges, he was the author who led me to
Walt Whitman and G. K. Chesterton. "In his youth, Carrió attended the lectures of the author of
Fictions. Today, he prefers Borgian poetry to the story.

He also highlights his readings of
Fault,
Karl Jaspers and works by Edith Stein and
Simone Weil Max Weber? "He is the last sage." John Stuart Mill? "When I read
On freedomI have already become a liberal left-wing Republican. "After her religious conversion, whose secret is Pope Francis, she chose to portray herself as a Christian humanist.

When he had to explain the sources of power in the cloisters, Carrió appealed to Sophocles of
Oedipus king: "In
Oedipus, the power was not to know. "For the voracious reader that Carrió was from his childhood,
Antigone He founded human rights. According to him, because of the few hours spent reading by Argentine politicians, the quality of public discourse has diminished over the years. "He fell a lot, it is like he had been thrown from the obelisk," graph.

"Eye that I've also read
people and
Hello! he says to this newspaper. Frivolity and depth must live together. "For some vision problems, the MP who begins to withdraw from the political scene (" but not the truth ", he notes) does not read much today." I'm with audio books and with YouTube documentaries, "he says.His goal is to develop, with his friend
Mario Quintana, a new world humanism based on education, coexistence and values. "The current enemy is the
lobby armaments, which comes from the hands of Trump and Bolsonaro. We must disarm societies, "he warns, an ally to defy violence, according to the protagonist of
Life, is reading.

Learn more about Carrió and books

Since its launch,
Life It is among the best-selling books of 2019. Almost simultaneously, it was published
Lilita The woman who defies power (Planet), Laura Serra's investigation into the political strategies of the leader of the Civic Coalition.

Without recording details and anecdotes about his family, his marriage and motherhood, and the formation of the rebellious character who recognized him on the national political map, Carrió also evokes the link with the personalities of politics, among which Raúl Alfonsín, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner ("I have never faced Cristina"), the presidential candidate Alberto Fernández (who, while he was chief of state) -Major Néstor Kirchner, never answered the phone), National Senator Miguel Ángel Pichetto and, Of course, President Mauricio Macri.