Katherine Mansilla

This paper seeks to show the proximity between the phenomenologicalreflection that Merleau-Ponty presents in the article “The War Has Taken Place”, and the stories of Jose Carlos Agüero, in his book, Los rendidos. From a phenomenological perspective, both authors describe the experience of pain, shame and forgiveness as the pursuit of freedom and justice. The text is divided into two parts. In the first part, we present discourses of justice which were established after the Peruvian armed conflict and the need of exercising the phenomenological “epochè” in order to describe the feelings of terror and shame that underlie as background of this shared experience. In the second part, supported by Merleau Ponty’s concepts of intersubjectivity and historicity, we define freedom as the pursuit of justice, which can only be understood at the primordialaction of being in relation with others, from which we give meaning to the past.

This article analyses the Hegelian notion of death, presented in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In this work, Hegel names death the “absolute master” and this idea appears in two different sections of the text. The first mention of the absolute master is in the death struggle for recognition, whereby the slave, who is aware of death and due to it experiments the anguish of its arrival, abandons the struggle to live at the service of his master. Thus, overcoming his own fear of death, the slave finds in its expression the transformation of the world. The second mention takes place in the analysis of the terror lived during the French Revolution. In this part, Hegel describes how the abstraction of absolute freedom is imposed upon all citizens, generating death and terror among individuals. In both experiences that the subjects respectively face, death appears as an experience that opens us to reflection and allows us to overcome immediacy.