Admiration for the complexity of her thought, her revealing power and the beauty of her prose, which have made her one of the most versatile and respected writers in Spanish language.
——Piedad Bonnett

Few works as suggestive and profound in recent years, among us, as that of Chantal Maillard.
——Antonio Colinas

Maillard is surely the most important and original
Spanish thinker since María Zambrano.
——Mario Martín Guijón, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos

There are many reasons for reissuing this essential book, published for the first time in 2009, now revised by the author. Among others, issues raised by Maillard still unresolved. Perhaps the most urgent, “the necessary recovery of the usefulness that the arts always had until Kant’s definition of it as an activity that is an end in itself.

The adverb against that introduces this book should be read not only in its most common sense, that of confrontation and offense, but also in the sense that designates the solidity of support. I have placed myself against art and other institutional concepts like someone who leans against a wall that, while protecting us, also restricts us. Walls, those of metaphysics, science, morality, politics, religion, the agreedupon ways of moving us socially and aesthetically, philosophy, or art theory, which we have built to sustain, defend, or protect ourselves but which, when they become solid, prevent us from seeing the other side, from crossing over into the unknown, and from learning other ways of walking, to be, and to relate to things, and, worse still, they make us forget that we ever built them in the first place.

The arts have always played an essential role in the formation of societies and their culture. So-called pure art is a phase that must be considered over. We must build a bridge between art before Art and art after Art, a bridge that spans the centuries (few, in reality) in which the arts shirked their responsibility and placed themselves at the service of various forms of egomania and greed.»

The opportunity and the proposal is once again within reach, in both a moral and aesthetic sense.

In Maillard’s own words, “No one ‘is’ a poet or philosopher, but
rather, for more or less time, is in a poetic or philosophical state.”
She was born in 1951 in Brussels, where she lived until she was
thirteen years old. In 1969, she acquired Spanish citizenship.
As doctor of Philosophy, specialized in Indian Philosophies and
Religions and a graduate in Aesthetics and Art Theory, she was a
professor at the University of Malaga until 2000, when a serious
illness forced her out of office. From that moment on, writing
would be her salvation; in her own words: “It is the fastest means I
have to move”. In 2004, she received the National Prize of Poetry
for Matar a Platón (Killing Plato). In 2007, the Critics’ Prize and
the Andalusian Critics’ Prize for Hilos (Threads). She is the author
of numerous essays and poetry books, but her writing can’t be
so easily categorized. She has been transcending genres, from the
tetralogy of her diaries to the hybride forms of her latest books,
in which he fuses poetry, essays and theater. Her poetry and some
of her essays have been translated into English, French, Dutch,
German and Italian. She has taken some of his works to theatrical
stages and has collaborated in interdisciplinary projects with artists
in the plastic, scenic, cinematographic and musical fields.