An Amorous Rebellion. Cainitic Love and Conflictual History in Miguel de Unamuno

Conflict and violence are at the core of Miguel de Unamuno’s philosophical and political thought. A never-ending dialectic is the method of his reasoning according to his conception of life as a continuous fight of opposites, preferred to the deathly stillness of any synthesis. Considering this theoretical frame, the present paper argues that the unamunian antagonistic relationship among fellow citizens is shaped on a Biblical paradigm, as he touches on the Abel and Cain myth and on the foundation of the City of Enoch (Gen 4:1–18). According to Unamuno, indeed, in violence resides the origin of civilization and its prosecution in the State, composed of loving “brothers” fighting a metaphorical civil war. At this regard, the paper theorizes the influence of the First Johannine Epistle and proposes that Unamuno’s hateless reinterpretation of fratricide is combined with the Heraclitean conception of global harmony as πόλεμος, which prevents the end of collision by rendering it perpetual and reciprocal.