Obituary for Janine Puget

It is not an easy thing to write an obituary so soon after the departure of a close friend, a maestra, and especially one like Janine Puget, one with such exceptional character. It is a painful task, but it also allows for the weaving together of aspects of her personal life and her prolific professional and intellectual career with those long periods of interchange and dialogue we had, which was open, sincere and sometimes sharp on both sides, hers and mine.

This text could only be the product of that spirit and that is why I dare to write it without her being here to give her opinion, as she often did on texts that I wrote, until just a few months ago. I feel lucky, however, that she was able to read and comment on my latest book, which has just been published, and I think that between the lines of what she wrote I can see a number of ideas that we discussed in the last few years.

Janine Puget was born in Marseille, France, in 1926 and died in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 4 November, 2020.

Throughout her professional life and right up to her death she was a colossal analyst: sensitive, intelligent and endowed with a distinguished and unique personality. There reigned in her life the paradox of the simultaneous presence of apparent contrasts, admirably maintained in balance between them. As an analyst, we could say both that she was classical in her outlook while also suggesting revolutionary approaches; she was sharp but charmingly pleasant, and she moved through the world in a way that was both serene and polemical; there were times when she defended the institutional to the letter, and others when she rebelled against aspects of the same. She navigated the oh-so-prevalent quicksands of Latin America, but did so with remarkable determination and this allowed her to pass through the turbulent zones of the society that she inhabited.

Her personal life was marked by traumatic events: migration in her early adolescence, the loss of members of her immediate family starting