La route comme mémoire et comme technologie : Essai sur la dimension philosophique des routes culturelles.

Abstract

What is a road? Why is it omnipresent? Continuing this investigation into the philosophico- definitional problematic of the concept of the road, this paper first proposes a reflection on the Heideggerian phenomelogy of technology to develop a thought of the cultural route as technè and as a communication medium, therefore a cultural artefact. However, as an artefact, the road also presents itself as the medium through which all other cultural objects, including language itself, appear. It is the mode that all cultural artefacts use to reach the world. The paper will conclude with a conception of the road which identifies it with what Bernard Stiegler (1998) calls (after Gilles Simondon) “preindividual” as the foundation of a philosophical anthropology where the cultural route appears as a source of both politics and culture.