Between shivers: A feminist reading of Jean Robert’s Los cronófagos

Abstract

Given the pressing themes developed in Los cronófagos. La era de los transportes devoradores del tiempo, a book written by Jean Robert and published by Itaca, the author of this review uses the metaphor of the bodily shiver that arises spontaneously in human corporeality in the face of a powerful emotional impact. Thus, from one shudder to the next, the reviewer, with a feminist sensibility, sets out the ways in which Robert identifies the capitalist urban form and the transport system of the industrial era as the causes of environmental deterioration, the disruption of neighborly relations, neoliberal real-estate speculation, the differentiated valuation of persons, and the destruction of old convivial ways in which Life was made possible. The account also sketches the proposal—the horizon of hope glimpsed by the brilliant, erudite, ever Life-loving being that was Jean Robert—which he leaves us as a commitment and a task for a society facing an ecological catastrophe in which all ways of life are at risk.