221
Joaquín Vázquez Ruiz de Castroviejo: One possible point in common among philosophy’s many formulations of the notion of “event” may be the idea that the event is a “break in continuity,” a mutation of existence. The Hiroshima bomb is a subject that recurs in many of your early works, reminding us not only of the overwhelming horror of the dropping of the bomb but also of the break it entailed from the preceding order. Can you expand on your way of approaching this event? Could we say that when you were making this extensive series of works you were not principally concerned with exploring the collapse of the scientific, political, and economic equilibrium that made it possible; that you wanted to explore and identify the cuts and mutations that the bomb—and the emergence of radioactivity as a new, unfamiliar threat—introduced in religiosity, in the popular imaginary, in the new ways of perceiving and interacting with the world? Pedro G. Romero: I touched on this before, but yes. On the one hand, the obviousness of the historical event, of how it weighs on us like an unbearable burden and how we accept it, too, just as we continue to make poetry after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In fact, a chain links Auschwitz and Hiroshima. I don’t know, we can think about how statistics and cybernetics were boosted by those events, and we now talk about algorithms and virtual reality as if their logic was unrelated to them. I was less interested in the apocalyptic dimension of these episodes than in their messianic nature, in a complex reading that ranged from Benjamin to Agamben, but had a lot to do with the acceptance of catastrophic time that we find in Simone Weil in a sense, but also in Natalia Ginzburg, for example. The work I was doing had to do with the profound disruption of everyday life, of everyone’s life, of anyone’s life. That idea of setting all the clocks to :, the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, or of thinking that
V
