«Governed meat», human and intellectual biography of Fernando Savater

Commenting on a friend’s book is always difficult for a task, but that friend is the great writer and philosopher Fernando Savater, the mission is further complicated. I will not go «Par Quatre Cheminins”, For four paths, as the French say when they do not want to divert too much of the subject: I am a lost and delivered reader of Savater. It was he who led me to the veneration of Emil M. Cioran; It is he who owes so much that the list of my debts would not fit in any article, even in a book.

Savater is a faithful writer, never disappoints his readers. “Governed meat. Of politics, love and desire, ”responds to that loyalty that Savater emanates in the form of teaching, pleasure, sensuality, vigor.

Published in 2024 by the Ariel publishing house, in Spain, later editions multiplied. I have the third. His reading not only made me happy again, like when you discover an author; In addition, it gave me the satisfaction of finding myself cited in its pages. Yes, Savater mentions me! What I appreciate even more. But it still remains …

The author explains: “The governed meat is a stew of Asturian cuisine in which cow meat is very slowly cooked. Today it is an almost missing meal, because a lot of time, care and care is required to prepare it, something uncommon in the times. ”

The editorial summons us: “As happens on the plate, this Governed meat, It is a unique work, written slowly and with love, and, above all, with unusual courage and intellectual coherence. These intimate passages of politics, love and desire, some tender and nostalgic, other angry and scathing, make up a legacy of undoubted value and are a fundamental piece to meet the crouched man after the intellectual. ”

No one doubts it, those who have read their work we know that this title of Fernando Savater vibrates permeated of love of life, of wisdom, which also translates into a certain skeptical halo and even elegant, mysterious. Of course, of the mystery or miracle we will deal with the end.

“Fernando Savater makes the wire of the love and sensual experiences of a lifetime, the memories of his childhood, his civic commitment and his political ideals (less changing what most believe) to reach their essence. In this journey, which will stir consciences and raise controversies, speak in a stark way of the reason of his ideological turn, of the constant longing of the woman of his life, of his relationship with the newspaper in which he has always written, of the melancholic memory of his parents, the recovery of an eroticism that he believed impossible or of the bittersweet look towards his country. ”

And concludes the presentation: «His most personal, free and iconoclast work.»

If they allow me, I will conclude, personally. While I finished the pages of the book I did not want to miss a documentary about Simone Veil, French, born in a Jewish family, deported with her family to Auschwitz, at the age of 16, where she lost her parents and her brother.

Holocaust survivor, he could then do law and political science studies; In 1974 she was Minister of Health under the mandate of Valéry Giscard d’Esting, icon of women’s defense was the first president of the European Parliament, elected under universal suffrage, in addition to the first to promote reconciliation between France and Germany.

Minister of State, Minister of Social, Health and City Affairs, elected in the Constitutional Council, member of the French Academy; buried in the pantheon of the great men and women of France.

The woman interests me a lot, her career seduces me. I had the privilege of knowing her briefly in a government visit to the house of Víctor Hugo; So while I saw the documentary also leafed through Savater’s book with the intention of finishing the four pages that I had left.

Upon reaching the end, while Simone Veil’s limpid face was projected on the TV screen, I read the farewell words with which the author seals his book, beautiful words of Simone Veil.