In an age of automation and accelerated production, where thinking risks being confused with the efficient generation of content, it becomes urgent to relearn how to think. To pause at what doesn’t flow. To care for what doesn’t fit. The glitch —that error, that stumble in the seamless functioning of the machine— reveals itself as more than a technical fault: it is an epistemic wound, or rather, an ontological wound. For in that stumble, the abyss suddenly opens between machinic calculation and the opacity of embodied experience; between the instrumental logic of artificial intelligence and the strangeness of a sensing body. The glitch tears the fabric of the world, exposing the gap between these two orders.

What it interrupts is not merely a mechanical operation, but a symbolic economy, an ontological texture where meaning circulates automatically, where language becomes tool and thought a product. This interruption is neither external nor accidental: it is an implosion. A collapse from within of a saturated symbolic order, unable to withstand the gaze of what lies beyond. The glitch doesn’t merely halt—it implodes. And in that implosion, something emerges that cannot be resolved or closed. A living wound. Something that calls us.

Here begins to take shape a glitch aesthetic: not an aesthetic of error, but a radical attention to what escapes, to what resists the logic of efficiency, clarity, and utility. An aesthetic of disjunction as a condition for meaning. This is not a decorative or illustrative aesthetic—it is epistemological. And therefore political. For it forces us back to the threshold between the sayable and the unsaid, the visible and what still trembles on its surface.

In that trembling resides what I have called ecognosis, paraphrasing Timothy Morton's concept: not knowledge as capture, but as resonance. Not as information about the world, but as a waking within it. A symbolic process that metabolizes reality without closing it off. From here, art can be rethought not as message production, but as the opening of thresholds. Not as artifice, but as event. As JT Martell puts it: art, not artifice. This is why the glitch is also an aesthetic of the body: it cannot be detected without being felt. It cannot be metabolized without a sensitivity to the wound.

This leads naturally to a pedagogical proposal, given the pharmacological intent of our thinking: a philosophical education that doesn’t just transmit content, but opens up spaces for attending to the glitch. A pedagogy that doesn’t just teach ideas, but cultivates the tremor in which ideas can emerge. Perhaps this is philosophy’s most urgent role today: not to provide answers, but to open. Not to close thought within productive structures, but to keep the disjunction, the hesitation, the interruption alive—and to teach how to inhabit it.

A dream can be metabolization or confinement. An image, a path or a prison. Thought, creation or automatism. It all depends on whether we can care for the wound, hold the moment when something doesn’t fit—and precisely for that reason, invites us to look again. The glitch, then, is not an exception: it is the condition. Not a malfunction, but the possibility of an ethics of thought that begins when we accept that thinking is not knowing, but exposure to what cannot be fully said.

July 26th 2025