Joxe Azurmendi Otaegi (born 19 March 1941) is a Basque writer, philosopher, essayist, and poet.
[5] He has been Professor of Modern Philosophy and a lecturer at Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (The University of the Basque Country).
[11] At the beginning of the 1960s he joined the cultural movement which grew up around the magazine Jakin, and was in fact the director of the publication when it was prohibited for the first time by Franco's regime.
In the 1980s he began teaching at The University of the Basque Country, and in 1984 he submitted his thesis on Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Mondragon cooperative movement, in which he argued that Arizmendiarrieta's project aimed to unite individuals and society under an organisation which combined both socialism and French personalism.
During the early years of the 21st century he published the trilogy formed by Espainiaren arimaz (About the soul of Spain) (2006, Elkar), Humboldt.
To this end, he adopts a relativist perspective, and given that modernity has left us with no solid base, he fights against the last vestiges of the dogmatism towards which our society tends to lean when in crisis: " The proclamation of relativism is provocative. ...
Once the sour critical analysis of sometime ago (Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man), the dark negative utopias (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell[22]) and the protest cries (May 68) are forgotten, and with a near lack of the slightest sense of resistance in civil society, the cobweb of power spins peacefully over our heads, all over the place.
[23] In this way, he defies certain Spanish and French intellectuals (Alain Finkielkraut[24]) and argues that nationalism in fact arose in France (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Ernest Renan) and was later reinterpreted by the German thinkers and romantics.
Azurmendi is within the Basque poetry of the 60s which shows the fight against the tradition, the old faith and the dogmatic certainties:[28][29] But we wish to be free is that my fault?
Manifestu atzeratua (Belated Manifesto) (1968) [30] He also dedicates a large part of his work to recovering and reinterpreting Basque thinkers, breaking through and dismantling numerous stereotypes.
In his language Joxe Azurmendi combines an educated register with colloquial expressions, and his prose is fast, incisive, and ironic.
Azurmendi's Basque is modern and standard and he demonstrates great knowledge of the language, and richness and variety of expression.
[37] In the previous decade, for example, all of his work was digitized; several articles were written, many of them by his former students; courses on his thought were organized and several magazines published monographs.
For example, at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) three doctoral theses which take Azurmendi as a reference have already been presented and didactic proposals have also been made to incorporate into the curriculum of the teaching system.
In this sense, the researcher Mikel Urdangarin has compared in his doctoral thesis the model of the subject developed by Azurmendi in his work and the model that has been developed by several feminist authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Silvia Federici, Monique Wittig, Maria Mies, Judith Butler or Vandana Shiva.