Born in Sofia in 1939, educated in Bulgaria, a communist, Todorov lived in Paris from 1963, where he arrived fleeing the totalitarianism of their country, an experience that I would not fail to illuminate your intellectual work.
“This fear of immigrants, on the other, the barbarians, will be our first great conflict in the TWENTY-first century”. In 2010, before the current refugee crisis, Tzvetan Todorov put into words the landscape that today surrounds us. The thinker franco-Bulgarian, considered one of the most important intellectual contemporaries, died today, at age 77 , in Paris. His constant gaze alert about the trends that pose a risk to the democracy not overshadowed never a trait of optimism, or hope in the human possibilities, he did original thinking.
Born in Sofia in 1939, educated in Bulgaria, a communist, Todorov lived in Paris from 1963, where he arrived fleeing the totalitarianism of their country, an experience that I would not fail to illuminate your intellectual work. Leaves, in that sense, a tour prolific and extensive: their books and their ideas are appreciated in the field of linguistics, history, political philosophy and literary criticism. Author of Theory of literature (1970), genres of discourse (1978), The man shifted (1997), The spirit of the enlightenment (2008), The fear of the barbarians (2008) and The totalitarian experience (2010), he received the Prince of Asturias award for Social Sciences in 2008, and since 1987 he directed the Center for Research on the Arts and the Language of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France.
Thinker key in the study of linguistics during the years 60 and 70, are turned over in the years 90 more to his role of historian. Their readers tend to recognize a critical thought that is not fed to the rancor, but of lucidity, of an attempt of balance and the opposition of the revenge of history. The great thinker of the history and the present day, european, defended democracy against extremism, and with realism, pointing out how the dangers which threaten from the Cold War they were not so much external but the fruit of the own rules and mechanisms of the democratic system. “The ideal of producing the earthly paradise may seem great, because we want everything to be perfect and all live in happiness, but in reality it is an ideal to mortal. What we learned the hard way. We realized that the democratic ideal, which is far less exciting, than the perfection of paradise, is worthy of respect and must defend it,” he said in an interview with The Nation in 2005 .
In 2010, he visited for the first time in Argentina; toured the ESMA and internalized about the work of Human Rights organizations. He published his impressions in the newspaper The Country, in the light of their own inquiries about the history and the memory. “A society needs to know the History, not only have memory -he wrote-. The Story helps us to come out of the illusion manichaean in which we often enclose the memory: the division of humanity into two watertight compartments, good and bad, victims and executioners”.
Tireless opponent of all forms of authoritarianism and the bait placed at the thought, he had a faith also unwavering in humans. “This may be naive, but I don’t think that nothing of what we suffer from today is irreversible. I refuse to believe in a supernatural force that imposes upon us things that can’t change. This is a human issue. And the changes will come from us,” he said in an interview in 2013.
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