Marina Garcés, born in Barcelona in 1973, has published more than ten books that have been translated into a dozen languages, from Un mundo común (2013) to El Temps de la Promesa (2023). In her autobiographical essay Ciutat Princesa (2018), she uses the 1996 eviction of activists who had turned an abandoned Barcelona cinema into an autonomous social center in order to argue for the protection of shared spaces where people can learn together. She teaches and researches at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and has long been an active community-organiser in Barcelona, co-founding in 2002 Espai en Blanc (Blank Space), an open and multidisciplinary experimental philosophy project.
La passió dels estranys (The Passion of Strangers) is a critical exploration of friendship, a bond Marina Garcés describes as the only « stable form of social interaction…that has not produced its own institution or legal status. » In late June, on the eve of Sant Joan, I interviewed Garcés via videocall.
In The Passion of Strangers, you discuss some of the stereotypical discourses around friendship. Are such discourses dangerous?
We have inherited a conceptual framework that idealizes friendship. Our philosophical tradition speaks of friendship as a true or perfect relationship: while reproductive, economic or political objectives run through other bonds, friendship seems to have no other purpose beyond itself — it is therefore pure, it contains all possible virtues. This idealisation is reproduced in everyday language, in the way we talk about friendship, and this ends up causing many frustrations in real life: it becomes very easy to feel that real friends are never quite up to par.
There are plenty of articles out there now about how to « break up with a friend » or « identify toxic friendships » — is it trendy to let friendships end?
I think there is a therapeutic concern that is colonizing a large part of the discourse about friendship and that has to do with emotional management within a capitalist paradigm of relationships. We’re constantly being asked to handle our relationships in terms of emotional benefit, keeping what serves us, and discarding what doesn’t.
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