Argentine writer Jose Pablo Feinmann dies at 78
Argentine writer José Pablo Feinmann, whose columns and interviews on a variety of subjects were a fixture on Argentine media in recent decades, died yesterday. He was 78.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1943 to a Brazilian Catholic mother and a Jewish father, Feinmann become an agnostic at an early age.
He taught philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1974. Feinmann repudiated political violence early on - at a time when many of the school's liberal arts students were adopting radical left-wing politics.
He later became known for his numerous novels, essays, columns, as well as screenplays - many of which were well received by European critics. Perhaps the best known was Last Days of the Victim (1979), which was made into an acclaimed 1982 thriller of the same name.
Upon the return of democracy, Feinmann's course Philosophy and the Mud of History grew to over two thousand students - a course later made into a Sunday supplement of the progressive Buenos Aires daily Página/12, where Feinmann contributed a weekly column until shortly before his death.
He also hosted Philosophy: Here and Now and Cinema Context on Argentine Public Television from 2008 until the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration downsized - some say, purged - the channel in 2016.
Feinmann was a lifelong supporter of Argentina's populist Peronist movement - though his friendship with the temperamental Néstor Kirchner suffered in 2006 however, when the then-president accused Feinmann of "living in an ivory tower."
Feinmann described himself in later years as "constantly consulted by the media, for all sorts of issues," and a "regular political polemicist - but who only argues with those he considers appropriate to do so."
"Given the weakness of the opposition’s arguments (which are expressed not by intellectuals but by paid publicists)," he considered, "there is less and less need to be polemical."
At: https://www-pagina12-com-ar.translate.goog/390085-murio-jose-pablo-feinmann-escritor-y-filosofo-de-lectura-imp?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US
Argentine writer José Pablo Feinmann in his Buenos Aires apartment.
His death on Friday was a blow to progressive Argentine political writing, still reeling from the deaths of Juan Forn and Horacio González - as well as pandemic-related measures which hit bookstores and theaters hard.
"To be a man is to know that we are going to die," he noted. "What's important is what we do in this that we agree to call life."
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