homo urgens: pedagogías de la urgencia en José María Arguedas, Pier Paolo Pasolini y José Revueltas

Abstract

The dissertation addresses the experience of urgency as trigger of unexpected configurations in the late works of what I have called the triad of urgency: the Peruvian José María Arguedas (1911-1969), the Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) and the Mexican José Revueltas (1914-1976). The strategies through which these authors gave shape to their aesthetics since the second half of the 1960s are analyzed in three chapters focused on death, community and pedagogy, respectively. Urgency, a notion taken from medicine, expresses a problematic condition that must be resolved, but in which there is still time to design and implement provisional yet concrete solutions “not determined totally by rational choice” (Elster 2009). The chapters explore, then, how the aesthetics of these authors embodied the urgent desires of what had been oppressed and/or discriminated. Likewise, this dissertation focuses on the relationship between urgency and pedagogy, and the notion of pedagogy of urgency is proposed: an educational process whose protagonist is not a healthy body or a body in emergency, but an urgent body who claims for justice. For the first time, comparative analysis of the following pedagogical figures is conducted: Pasolini’s unrecognizable, Arguedas’ fox and Revueltas’ self-maker; educational agents who cannot be identified or classified by the hegemonic power due to their strategic ambiguity and ability to act in multiple and sometimes contradictory historical fronts. Arguedas, Pasolini and Revueltas were teachers and therefore worried about the future of education which they considered in danger of turning people into a servile reflex of late capitalism. The comparative analysis of their late works (poems, novels, films, translations, philosophic texts, etc.) seeks to introduce the notion of urgency in debates on education in Latin America, especially in Peru and Mexico. From the late sixties, these authors considered the binary communism/capitalism untenable because both had fallen prey to ideological dogmatism and politico-economic imperialism. The urgent response that these authors offered, then, was not binary, but multidimensional (or perspectivist), that is, the three reached the conclusion that the future of human beings relies on their ability to confront urgency creatively and empower themselves in diverse spheres to transform their history.