Idiocy is not synonymous with anonymity (the dissolution of the subject in the common) nor with stupidity (the misuse of intelligence); idiocy must be understood as a displacement of openness that suspends the centrality of reason, the model of subjectivity that shelters it (the person), and the devices that protect it (law, traditional political forms, and established community models). The idiot, against the violence of consensus, opens thought to a field of singularities that liberates the subject from itself and throws it into the childlike (non-personal) space of a full time. Through this opening outside reason and its ideological and institutional continents, the idiot has a destituent force that allows him to confront the insignificance of the real (the idiocy of the world) without abdicating his creativity. The idiot thus becomes the protagonist of a retreat, not to be silent, but as a guarantee of attention and enthusiasm.

The project is presented as a heterodox archive with the purpose, not of capturing the idiot but, on the contrary, of opening up his figure in numerous incarnations. The archive of idiots—real and fictional—is accompanied by two approaches: the performative activation proposed by Javier Peñafiel and the reflections on the figure of the idiot offered by Esperanza López Parada, Carlos Losilla, Chantal Maillard, and Ester Jordana.