Genealogy of the Subject-Person
Every human being, as both «hard» and «soft» current human sciences tell us, is always “Embodied” (inherent, incorporated, diluted in its constitutive matter), “Embedded” (relational, or rather social, dependent on the human relations that he/she experiences) and “Extended” (extended to the world, co-existing with it).
Therefore, not surprisingly, biogenesis, family, setting, culture and society influence us, the quality and quantity of our education, as well as the way in which each of us structures his/her relations with the world and with him/herself.It follows that “a subject constitutes him/herself in subordination, and this subordination represents the ongoing condition of possibility” of his/her potential being and his/her being as he/she is (Butler 1997 [my translation]).
No pedagogy can underestimate these genealogical dynamics of the subject becoming person. They reveal an opaque and passive dimension of educational processes that cannot be eliminated and, in addition, that is also fundamental for the following emergence of people’s transparent, free and active dimension. Natural attitudes and genetic predispositions need, indeed, an environment of life and relations at least allowing its emergence, if not always supporting it.
This discourse, as is documented by his educational path (Agazzi 2008a, b), matters for Evandro’s personality as well as for everybody. And it engages Pedagogy to explore in a more and more accurate and preliminary way these genealogical dynamics of the self-person. Evandro has often underlined the importance of this pedagogical principle in the understanding of education, in order to set it in a realistic and concrete way. Starting, self-reflectively, from his own education.
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