A Textual Model. Spatial Memories from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature

INTRODUCTION
For the 100^th anniversary of the Graduate-Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (FFyL), eight graduates write about places that became emblematic of our time there. It has been some time since we last lived there and now we are far from it, but we realize that our walk through the academic realm is marked by the time and space we shared back then.

Each mentioned place corresponds to a personal experience. In this collective article we propose to travel through specific places in the main building which still prevail in our memories. But our journey is fragmentary, since we stick to certain places and to the years when we frequented them, between 2004 and 2021. Our voices and our memories, as our bodies did before, intersect here to occupy a common space, a place we want to reconstruct and preserve as part of the FFyL’s history.

1. ENTRANCE FOOTPRINTS
The memory comes back to me almost ten years after the event occurred. It was November 7^th, 2014, when the students crowded at the entrance of the FFyL listened with indignation to a radio message from the then Attorney General, José Murillo Karam, who told the so-called “historical truth” about the events at Ayotzinapa. This image now returns to me as I think about the 100^th anniversary of the faculty and its footprints of my experience there during the time it crosses.

It is not the first time it happens. I began my undergraduate thesis, a text on Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, with that same memory. The image contained the ambiguity of Utopia in Bloch’s thought, in the tension built by what he calls the “darkness of a lived instant”: the impossibility of taking hold of what has just happened, and the possibility of utopic remembering as an instant of time stopped a symbol of what is not-yet illuminating our closeness as a distant other.
Although the memory was marked by pain and uncertainty in the face of the forced disappearance of 43 students, it was also marked by the utopian experience of the blossoming of a social movement and the community that was forming inside the university.

During these years the image of the faculty’s entrance occupied by students has been with me as a reminder of contemporary non-contemporaneity, of disjointed times, spaces, and life experiences, in which I believe lies the greatness of Filos which may take the form of strikes and political organization, but also that of the other collective spaces that had nurtured discussions and topics addressed in classrooms and also in life. While my academic experience in the faculty and the preparation there acquired have been invaluable for me, even more endearing was my passage through a faculty that is other, perhaps not yet existing, but insisting and coexisting with the original, whose entrance was an invitation to transit and inhabit it.

After the pandemic, while coming back to Filos, I noticed, with the joy and the surprise of someone who has lost the habit, that the mismatch remains celebrating life: under the faculty columns there was now a crowded student flea market selling and exchanging from books to gomichelas. I am sure that some officials don’t like it and are making projects to transform the faculty in a campus with “international standards”. I recognize that those mismatches never stop seducing me. They are promises of happiness that make me company. In dark and catastrophic times, it helps keep chasing the footprints of hope.

2. HALLWAYS. THE POSSIBLE
FFyL is to me the place of the possible. Particularly, the possible is updated in the hallways. In these transit spaces, more than just passing by, communication takes place because it I there where encounters happen, where we wait for the teachers, where we argument with our fellow students: there are always echoes and the walls have lots of information.

I first enrolled in Pedagogy, an area that comprises all the faculty’s disciplines because of the diversity of the educational phenomenon. I was particularly interested in Philosophy and History of Education. In the second floor’s hallway, every schedule of the faculty was posted. At the beginning of every semester, I would stop by to choose the courses I was interested in. Then I discovered the simultaneous degree program and without thinking twice, I took the opportunity. In the faculty I was able to study various degrees in a stimulating environment while learning from friendly and wise people.

Besides the information travelling through the hallways, there was another form of exchange. It was hard to move back then, there was a lot of hustle, but the diversity of people and conversation produce a sensation of ordered chaos that ended in tranquillity once every by-passer arrived to where they were going: the classrooms. There were passionate arguments among students in the hallways, while waiting for a class to start or for our turn to give an oral exam. That was also the time to gather with colleagues from other classes or programs. Hallways were, with no doubt, an important place for us between one class and the other.

Our formation in critical thinking, the hours studying in the libraries, our teachers teachings and the great friendships made during my time at this institution, allowed me to build an academic project whose next stop was the doctorate in Paris. The differences between the FFyL and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne are not minor, but the atmosphere was quite familiar for me from the beginning. Both are public institutions, and both have professors and colleagues willing to exchange ideas and discuss them. The FFyL allowed me to immerse into the academic and professional world, to which my family was not able to give me access. Regarding this, it is also important to highlight that this public higuer education institution has been making possible, during one hundred years, the training of professionals and the knowledge production in humanities, while maintaining a dialogue with other universities around the world.

3. THEATRES. ECHOES
Each generation that walks the faculty becomes an echo in the hallways, an echo that coexists in this place and inhabits inside each person. We find a place to act and fill the spaces through our voice and body, the spaces we adopt lacking confidence to achieve our goals: the columns of the Train of Humanities and the Rosario Castellanos Garden.

It only takes a person walking through an empty space while other watches to make the theatrical event occur, as stated by Peter Brook in The Empty Space. We are able to adapt to any circumstance, and, with the tools available, we may work together to transform empty spaces into live stories that we can share. We can transform empty spaces into places of communion where ideals can travel, where communication effectively takes place and where the possible can happen. We work as a team or we do not work at all, but in order to propitiate collective work, personal work should exist first: it is here where the best experience of being part of the Dramatic Literature and Theater program lies.

We are not taught to “perform”; we are taught to know ourselves so that we can show everything that we are, adapted to different bodies, personalities, and contexts. The flag for this process is selfperception and self-emotional regulation. The more sensitive we are before the world surrounding us, the more elements we will have for our creative processes. There is no room for self-deception.

The presence of this program at the FFyL is an example of the convergence that characterizes it, generating an environment where ideas, knowledge, opinions, thoughts, and positions circulate freely. Thinking is not an enemy of emotion; theory is not an enemy of practice.

As a student I was aware of university education quality, but back then I lacked referents to compare my experiences. I’m following now a Master’s degree on Theater, Performances, and Society, at Université Paris 8, where, curiously, I found my French FFyL because of its similar ideals, spaces, and convergences. It feels familiar.

In Mexico I have seen how eurocentrism distorts our standards. In spite of this, living and studying in France helps me to constantly review my knowledge about the world. Today, as a former student, I can value even more having met the people that gave me the tools that I use in my profession and my life, from this position with Latin American perspective that I would not change for anything else.

In its 100^th anniversary, I celebrate being a part of these classrooms and its community. We all are the FFyL.

4. STUDENT MOBILITY OFFICE (2013-2015)
Studying a Modern Literature degree means studying one of the living languages of Western Europe (German, French, English, Italian, or Portuguese) as well as a part of the literature written in those languages. Since Spanish language and literature are partially excluded, a degree in Modern Literature implies, from the very beginning, opening to international contexts, beyond our national borders, beyond our stories and beyond the Hispanic American region. The international scope of the FFyL does not end in the study of transatlantic languages and literatures, since one of the possibilities of the Modern Literature program is to carry out an academic exchange abroad. To get information and continue the process, a decade ago you had to go to the Student Mobility Office, which used to be located on the first floor, turning left after the entrance, next to the theatres area, before reaching the Graduate Studies Coordination. The possibility of studying at least one semester abroad is offered in other FFyL programs, but Modern Literature is where it makes the more sense since it implies studying a language and literature in the place it was created or where it primarily developed. This first international possibility often leads to a second one, when you decide to enrol in a graduate program in Modern Literature abroad. This unique and enriching experience tests the knowledge and skills we acquired and developed at FFyL. Besides, it is clear that, the place that learning takes during the first and the second period of internationalisation, has changed: while inside the FFyL classrooms was pretty common to inaugurate a space for collective exposition and discussion, in other places (for example, when you go on exchange or do a graduate program abroad), the master class maintains a hierarchy between professors and students, or a seminar reproduces and applies already proven knowledge. In other places, there is little or no space to present or discuss your own ideas. While, at FFyL, expressing and presenting ideas and debates is a daily singularity, something that is missed when you visit other faculties from other latitudes.

5. ROSARIO CASTELLANOS GARDEN. SHELTER
I saw myself walking through the FFyL hallways, the discrete door at the end of the sill was calling me to go inside an internal patio known as Rosario Castellanos Garden. Its tables and chairs to enjoy a rare tranquillity at a faculty whose hallways are always trembling with footsteps, heated arguments, food selling, and assemblies. From that moment on, I was not able again to separate myself from the tranquillity that gave me something I had been looking for, since I left the State of Mexico to begin my Philosophy studies: a shelter.

LEARNING TO EXPRESS RAGE AND SOLIDARITY THROUGH PROTEST ALLOWS LIFE TO PREVAIL OVER DEATH

It is worthy to ask oneself what makes FFyL a place of knowledge and at the same time, a place to be born again. On some occasions, for people who have abandoned their family home, the past can become a violent wind that manifests when we allow our minds to be absorbed by it. To avoid the past absorbing us it is important to appeal to self-care and knowledge that makes the heart and mind adopt new chances for creating a new identity. FFyL gave me four resources: friendship, exegesis, “a world in which many other worlds can fit” (Manifiesto, EZLN, 2018), and rage.

To insist on the fourth resource, I would state that the 100^th FFyL anniversary cannot take place unless I recognize the way in which it taught me to confront the intolerable, which tends to be fed by historical principles based on terror. Terror paralyses, but paralysis, if it is correctly managed is not long-lasting, especially if it is collectively disarmed. Learning to express rage and solidarity through protest allows life to prevail over death.

As an act of protest, it is fundamental for me to see in the centennial figure not only the celebration for Literature and Humanities having a home at UNAM, but also to see a living figure that says almost everything about the historical reality of Mexico. The more than one hundred thousand missing people are a tragic revelation of what time means now. When I was still frequenting this faculty-shelter, it was the number 43 that inhabited us. Now that the years and my shelters have multiplied, the numerical has taken on a dimension that deserves the rage to operate as more than one hundred. So, my wish for the FFyL on its 100^th birthday is that it continues to be a shelter for those figures so that none of them becomes an orphan, so that none of them becomes just a number.

6. RESTROOMS. STORIES
There are places which can be experienced as stories and shelters: they include plots, characters, and landscapes that fill these places with such aura that sometimes may be endearing, sometimes may be contradictory, but always… singular. FFyL is that kind of place, and like an oral story, it tells memories of generations that have crossed its spaces; as a written story, it has been printed in the walls, the desks, and restrooms doors.

Everyone knows, for example, the story of the woman in 1968 who hid from the police in the faculty restrooms [see p. XX in this issue.] Many have read Roberto Bolaño’s version in Amuleto, but the truth is that this story has been passing through FFyL since it happened and, like any other legend, its interpretations over time have multiplied. When I first entered to FFyL, this was one of the first stories I listened to. I didn’t learn it accurately, so, for a long time I continued to believe that she still walked through the hallways. It didn’t matter that Alcira Soust, the Uruguayan poet whom the story belonged in the first place, died long before, because her story inhabited the faculty in a more perennial and tangible way than any of the students enrolled. Studying in the FFyL was knowing that the WC was a trench for resisting repression.

Places that tell their stories have become an exception more than a norm among universities. The same fate have places that harbour resistance. In Paris, all that remains of the Université Libre de Vincennes and May ’68 is memory. That is something I was able to prove when, in an attempt to recover a historic space for students’ organisation, more anti-riot police than students arrived. Or when in Vienna the students recently “occupied” the university auditorium, but during the occupation months, cleaning workers kept coming to clean the restrooms and restock toilet paper, which shows how any hint of selforganisation was already captured in advance by the institution.

This is relevant because anyone who has been at FFyL knows that the only time when there was no lack of toilet paper was during strikes, when its distribution was collectively managed by students. This shows how far FFyL is a faculty that has other self-images, overflowing it and making its own disruption possible. Unlike other nonplaces, without memory nor stories, which seem more like control systems than living spaces for education and learning, inside FFyL the horizon of possibilities has always been open, thanks to the fact that there are still stories in its restrooms making it what it is.

7. THE PROJECTORS ROOM: GOING OUT OF FILOS, RETURNING TO FILOS
There is this room at FFyL where screen projectors are kept to be lent for use in classes or events. Why are these screen projectors not fully installed inside the classrooms? Everyone in the Filos community knows the answer to this question. If projectors were kept inside classrooms, they would be stolen. Over time, I came to realise that the peculiarity was not about these projectors being stolen, but that their absence was irrelevant for the faculty.

After finishing my Philosophy bachelor’s degree, I obtained a scholarship to study a Master’s degree abroad. It was the beginning of a journey that took me away from Filos both geographically and as a discipline. I eventually abandoned my false expectation about how the values inside any leftist faculty, such as university autonomy, would outweigh the cost of one, or hundreds of projectors. At the same time, I understood how the technological environment at FFyL had shaped my way of thinking. What kind of philosopher can be created in a megalopolis where you are taught to think following the rhythm of chalk strokes? As we become aware of how much listening and time pauses took us to appreciate the cycles of thought (its genesis, its hatchings, its diffractions), remembering jokes about Power Point presentations or the expert handling of the chronometer made me feel tenderness. If the faculties of philosophy and literature are the last strongholds of literary-phonetic teaching, Filos holds the place of honour in this resistance. Perhaps catastrophic, but, before that, splendid and endearing.

It could be said that I never left Filos, since I never stopped meeting its people. With them, complicity soon appears, because nothing is as pleasant as meeting people open to some kind of odyssey. It starts with an inflection in the voice, followed by a nuance in the stare. The mix results in a long conversation and probably the beginning of a friendship. Many turns following Filos’ traces allow me to think about the meaning of living from Humanities, and if it is possible, to transmit them on. If requesting those reviled projectors is so relevant in my memories it is because, by recurrently visiting the faculty’s backyard, I noticed that I was not only part of Filos as a professional chair taster, as an agora moderator, or conspirator of the “airports” (the places where we used to see the sunset. Thirty-five days away from returning to Filos to teach a semester workshop, I join my colleagues’ efforts to diversify humanities teaching. However, I must confess that the rhythm of the chalk will always be my most beloved tool.

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