Entretelones de una "estética operatoria" Luis Juan Guerrero y Walter Benjamin

this essay deals with the aesthetic-philosophical work of the argentinean luis juan guerrero (1899-1957), through a consideration of its early and fruitful reception of some central aspects of walter benjamin's work. it is shown that this perspective allows a privileged access to guerrero's work, at the same time that it makes more complex the image of the "anti-positivistic" intellectual generation in argentina. guerrero's forgotten work includes principally contributions on ethics, psychology and aesthetics. this essay will pay attention only to his most important work, maybe the most ambitious aesthetic work ever written in argentina: operatory aesthetics in its three directions. this aesthetic summa, although it expresses the typical features of an intellectual generation marked by german interwar culture and the concerns on the "culture crisis", it also inscribes a benjaminian anomaly, a political-materialistic inflection, that questions the frequent opinion that the "culture crisis" in those years diagnosed always showed "spiritualist" answers.