In 1979, I published Figuras de la conciencia desdichada. It was a conceptual tale, the work of a young student, of a child whose German mother and Catalonian father had experienced the vicissitudes of General Franco’s terrorist regime and who, through generational protests rejected the atrocities of the global capitalist system but also saw hope in the most active intellectual media in Berlin, Mexico, Prague and Paris in 1968. Suddenly, I came to understand that the dreams of our generational would not become reality. For that reason, I chose a different route: the history of unhappy consciousness and the dark side of the Christian, Hegelian and positivist spirit of modern History.
These were ‘craft essays’ on the negative reconstruction of the history of the West in works such as The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, the poems of Hölderlin, the romantic Faust, or Cavafis’ Ithaka. In these essays and others that followed and ultimately, in my doctoral thesis, El alma y la muerte (1983), I focused on reconstructing the figures of negative modern consciousness as markers of resistance against the logos of progress.