Resumo

NAVASCUES MARTINEZ, Nicolás de. On a Baudelairean Intertext in La velocidad de la luz by Javier Cercas: A Levinasian Interpretation of Guilt. En-clav. pen [online]. 2026, vol.20, n.39, pp.21-40.  Epub 27-Jan-2026. ISSN 2594-1100.  https://doi.org/10.46530/ecdp.v0i39.776.

This article proposes a reading of La velocidad de la luz by Javier Cercas through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. My hypothesis is that the Lithuanian philosopher’s ethical phenomenology allows for an unprecedented understanding of the literary work in question, while at the same time, this novel offers a different perspective on Levinas’s thought, particularly with regard to art. Thus, my argument develops through the identification of an intertext from Baudelaire in the narrative under study. By analyzing this intertextuality, I argue that Cercas disrupts the linear and closed movement of the text in order to open it up, to interpellate, to unsettle, and to alter the reader’s experience. In this way, the moral problems raised by the novel do not remain in an unidentifiable exteriority; rather, they return to the reader, rendering them incapable of escaping their own sense of guilt. At this point, one perceives an analogy between the literary or the aesthetic and the ethical. This issue, which is traditional in Levinasian studies, is understood and interpreted here in a different way thanks to the use of Cercas’s novel. At the same time, Levinas’s ethical thought emerges as a key interpretative framework that reveals the challenges posed by the Spanish writer in his work.

Palavras-chave : Philosophy and Literature; Intertextuality; Contemporary French Philosophy; Ethical Literature; Spanish Contemporary Literature.

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