Agustín García Calvo
1926–2012 · Spanish philologist, poet and thinker
Agustín García Calvo (Granja de Moreruela, 1926 – Zamora, 2012) was a Spanish classical philologist, poet, playwright and thinker. His work joins scholarly rigour with a radical critique of power, which gives him a distinctive place in twentieth-century Spanish thought.
He studied Classical Philology at Salamanca and earned his doctorate in Madrid with a thesis on ancient prosody and metre. He held chairs in Seville and at the Complutense University of Madrid, from which the Franco regime removed him in 1965 for supporting student protests. He then spent several years in exile in Paris, teaching at Lille and at the Collège de France. In 1976 he regained his Madrid chair, which he kept until his retirement in 1992.
His thought holds that Reality is an abstract construction that reduces things to ideas, and that the individual and the numerical mass are ways of subjecting people. Against this he defends «the people», the unpredictable element that escapes the plans of Power, and he regards democracy, the State and Capital as expressions of one and the same domination. His theory of language, set out in the trilogy Del lenguaje, presents words both as an instrument of control and as a form of popular expression.
Key ideas
- Reality: an abstract construction that presents itself as a faithful picture of what exists, reducing things to manageable ideas.
- Individual and mass: people are organised as individuals who can be added up into a numerical mass, which makes them easier to plan and control.
- The people: the unpredictable part of human life that escapes the calculations of Power and keeps rebellion possible.
- Language: a tool of domination when it creates the illusion that we know everything, but also popular expression when it reveals that Reality does not cover it all.
Curiosities
An anthem for one peseta
At the request of Joaquín Leguina, the first president of the Community of Madrid, he wrote the Community's anthem for the symbolic price of one peseta.
A thesis never written
In the 1970s he planned with his student Fernando Savater a doctoral thesis on an invented ancient philosopher, whose fragments he would write; the project was never completed.
A discussion circle in the Latin Quarter
During his exile in Paris he organised a political discussion group at the café La boule d'or in the Latin Quarter.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.