| Sumario: | There may be, after all, an intimate, complex, and paradoxical relation between ‘publish’ and ‘perish’. This may be analogous to the one Derrida posed between ‘writing’ and ‘death’, and anticipates as well the now classical critique of Enlightenment of the Frankfurt School. The birth of the modern public space may have to do with this, as well as the growing speed of communication, as sensed by a Cervantes who, in many ways, shares the old-fashioned epistemology of his famous madman Don Quixote, unable to adjust himself to the modern times. By carefully analyzing all of Cervantes' paratextual material, some interesting patterns emerge, that bring forth this curse of the book that relates publication to death, as we nonchalantly express it when we say it of our duty as academics. Since publication is, by its very nature, the ‘birth’ of a book (its outing into the social corpus), the possibility that such births are too close to ‘still-births’—even to ‘abortions’, sheds a deeply critical light into our cultural practices.
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