The philosopher Xavier Rubert de Ventós dies

‘Big head’, but an enemy of ‘déjà vu’ and more of ‘déjà dit’ and even more of ‘déjà écrit’. Perhaps the most singular characteristic of Xavier Rubert de Ventós, who died this morning in Barcelona at the age of 83, was the ability to surprise, even to surprise yourselflike someone who quietly turns around without moving from the table, touches his shoulder with a finger and gives himself a fright: surprise! Surprise and turn in the course of his thought, in his action, in the very existence that allowed himself to be led, as a good biologist, by impulses, not by acute meditations or by the severe overlapping of syllogisms. That’s why, because, allergic to mental routineshe dodged the commonplace and attacked both totems and taboos, reading his essays it’s so fascinating and irresistible.

This country raised them, the first in line, and they would come together to be stimulated by contrasts or entrenched in coincidences. Xavier Rubert and Pasqual Maragall. Perhaps not so well known, his other privileged and constant interlocutor, Ricardo Bofill, with whom he had at least one long weekly telephone conversation. They were so in tune that, having quit smoking some time ago, the architect interrupted him, ‘Xavier, what are you smoking again?’ And not because the phone transmitted neither the smoke nor the exhalation of tobacco, since at that time I did not smoke. ‘Who could have told you?’ ‘It’s that he was scared, since you left him you were half off, it seemed that it wasn’t you.’ This was explained to me, against everything and everyone, to prove it and set an example: tobacco stimulates neurons. And if not, remember Pla, who couldn’t find the adjective without a cigarette.

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He also explained his fall from the horse and conversion to independence, a non-nationalist ‘soi disant’, when, a Socialist deputy in Congress, a Secretary of State told him the feat of how Pujol had been deceived once again, stealing a transfer with a small letter that prevented its execution. ‘They don’t annoy him, she thought, but me as a Catalan.’ Hence his most important book, ‘Catalonia: from identity to independence’.

In the prologue, Pasqual Maragall, another daring of the first order, stated that he was already a candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat that I would agree with my friend if he failed in the titanic company of the new lace with Spain. And it is here, in the book and in the prologue, not in such a sentence of the TC or in such a massive demonstration, where the ‘procés’ begins, with a pro-independence proposal of a very broad spectrum that anticipated the expected failure of the Sau Statute. Here it is, well drawn and outlined, the map that guided Artur Mas in the political part and Junqueras tries to continue in the social. Perhaps if things had turned out the way he wanted, Xavier Rubert de Ventós would have left us an even more surprising posthumous book, ‘Catalonia: from independence to retrobated identitat’.

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