Joan Cuscó. Subjectivitat i Creativitat. Temps, memòria i creació. Barcelona: Publicia, 2018, 392 p.

Abstract

Joan Cusco’s work Subjectivitat i Creativitat. Temps, memoria i creacio (Subjectivity and Creativity. Time, memory and creation) is an attempt to comprehend creativity thruough the filter of subjectivity. The epigraph of the book already anticipates the trajectory and logic of the research presented by the author, who, in the form of an erratic movement—various authors, apparently heterogeneous—explores and discovers, as an explorer in an unknown land, a clear image, elaborated in a solid and disciplined project: the nature of human subjectivity. As the author tells us, subjectivity will be the way to approach or try to understand human creativity; and this approach will be done—as if it were a composition of a musical chord, constituted by four notes—through the comprehension and mutual relationship between mind, brain, consciousness and language. The research presented by Cusco is based on a plural and multifocal approach between scientific knowledge, philosophy and art, always avoiding reductionists views and encouraging unconditional dialogue between these disciplines or perspectives. Throughout his composition, the author progressively reveals a certain conception of human thought or of human nature in general terms. Human nature, Cusco defends, must be understood from the dialectic between necessity and possibility, that is, from the double perspective of understanding our existence as organisms attached to certain necessities and possibilities open up by our symbolic capacity. It is in this manner that the author tries to capture the space that separates biology from artistic creation; and he does this by avoiding at all times to fall into any kind of reductionism, mainly in the idealism that considers humans as singular beings in the bosom of creation; and also avoiding various forms of dualism, such as the one between biology and culture, between body and mind, and ultimately between philosophy and science. The whole work shows an extraordinary mastery of specialised literature on the issues addressed, from biology to philosophy, through art and artistic creation. Especially noteworthy is the attention to Catalan thinkers and scientists, often neglected by the academic research done in Spain itself—an element that shows how Cusco’s work has a clear international aspiration and remains rooted in the fruitful production of his homeland.