Luis Guerra

This article explores the work and thought of French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (1913-1996), focusing on his last project commonly referred to as the Tentative des Cévennes, developed between 1967-1996. From this experience that Deligny forged together with his collaborators, the article exposes the generation of a particular form of knowledge, a philosophy subordinated to a gestural solidarity network formed by human and non-human bodies, environments and situations, minimal gestures, everyday actions, and contingent events, visible only through a series of aesthetic devices that were developed during this period: writings, traces, maps, films, interviews, and wanderings. This gestural philosophy would be linked to a series of actions that would constitute an organic system in its apparent material dispersion. The article is organized through a biographical and historical contextualization, to later deploy the theoretical framework of the research and a conclusion.

Between philosophical essay and poetic experimentation, this text by the Chilean philosopher and artist pays tribute to Fernand Deligny, whose work on autism has allowed a more experimental understanding of difference. Wandering Echoes veers between philosophical thought and poetic experimentation, asking for a reading by way of multiple and meandering lines. Underpinning the book is a profound engagement with Fernand Deligny, whose work with autistic children in the 1960s and 70s posed a more experimental understanding of the diversely abled. Wandering Echoes is a work under the influence of Deligny, amplifying his gestural philosophy through lines of thought whose echoes and vibrations lead into a labyrinthine text of personal experience, soft moments and deep restlessness. Subtle and demanding, the book is ultimately an act of poetic-doing which, for the author, enables emergent forms of solidarity.

By considering the position of education as a pharmakon, highlighting its potential positive and negative effects on societies by its technical unfolding, the article proposes to explore the political and pedagogical role that public and collective performances can have within the public sphere as political devices for promoting and enacting radical democracy. To this end, it analyzes a contemporary collaborative artistic practice, the performance ‘Un Violador en Tu Camino’ (‘A rapist in your path’) by the feminist collective LASTESIS from Chile, through two main philosophical perspectives: Bernard Stiegler (1952 – 2020), and his approach to technology, to art, and education in human societies; and Oliver Marchart, coming from his conceptualization of art and activism through the notion of conflictual aesthetics.

This article explores Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical approach to culture in dialogue with Oliver Marchart’s postfoundational framework and conflictual aesthetics. Through the exposition of two different cases of gestural devices, it exposes Stiegler’s potential postfoundational aesthetics as an attempt to establish the necessary conditions for re-thinking the grounded-ungrounded existing relationship between humans, technical objects, and the composition of potential realities to grasp from an autopoietic relationship. These artistic and cultural examples are considered critical concepts that enhance and interrupt the philosophical discourse. The article argues that Stiegler’s aesthetics is committed to the capacity that art, as a technology of the spirit, can contribute as agency in shaping public power, even when these agents are not directly in conflict and develop lesser and fragile performative technics through which a memory becomes present again.