The air of Arguedas in the 1960s: a common and critical substance

Abstract

This essay considers the role of air, a substance common to all living beings, in three of Arguedas’ works written during the 1960s: El Sexto (1961), “Llamado a algunos doctores” (1966) and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1971). Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s critique of Martin Heidegger’s place-based philosophy, it approaches Arguedas’s work via the air instead of from the vantage point of territory to privilege intersubjectivity and affective movement instead of subjective containment and situatedeness in the late Arguedian corpus.