It seems hard to imagine a concept more significant to modern thought than critique. Critique involved distancing oneself from religious explanations and theological argumentation and came to represent the essence of secular consciousness's potential to deliver modernity's promise of human progress through rational inquiry and scientific development. Critiques of Theology debunks this common understanding. Based on a novel reading of previously less-discussed writings by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, the book shows how the practice of critique (...) emerged out of religious traditions and can, in many ways, be traced back to them. This study points to a persistent misreading of critique and demonstrates that it does not come from outside of religion to build a new world of ideas; on the contrary, it redeploys those already present within its theological constellations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I will offer some examples of the effectiveness of Adorno’s concept of mimesis for an analysis of extreme violence and for a defence of democratic institutions against possible regressions into authoritarian regimes. I will start by reading the concept of mimesis through the lens of the interlacement between the concepts of play and power. My aim is twofold: first, I wish to further the analysis of Adorno’s concept of mimesis by showing that it can be interpreted (...) as a form of play, which either empowers subjectivity or becomes a means of domination; second, I will use these speculations to highlight the relevance of Horkheimer and Adorno’s explanation of anti-Semitic violence when seen through the lens of the concept mimesis. Before concluding, I will briefly highlight Adorno’s ideas about what makes democracy vulnerable to potential regressions into extreme violence, and examine what can be done practically – from an Adornian perspective – to avoid regression: defending democratic institutions, and working towards a removal of those barriers that obstruct genuine mimetic experience and self-reflection. (shrink)

This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they (...) are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim’s early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today. (shrink)

The early Twentieth Century satirist, Karl Kraus, set himself the goal of exposing all journalistic language and advertising for what they are: essential links in the social reproduction of the imperialist epoch. Charlie Brooker, creator of the television program Black Mirror and the documentary series How TV Ruined your Life, is virtually the only contemporary critic who takes up the task of Kraus’s destructive judgment against the impoverishment of language and experience. Taking its formal and analytic cue from Walter Benjamin’s (...) famous essay on Kraus, this essay traces the affinity and difference between the form and content of Kraus’s and Brooker’s social criticism and art. In presenting, for example, their respective methods of quotation, as well as the relationship between the “entertainment” of the twenty-four hour “news” stream and the false promise of participation in the bourgeois public sphere, the present form of domination comes to the fore in a new light. In order to grasp this form, that is, the completed or perfected illusion of the present composition of capital, Guy Debord’s conception of the “spectacle economy” is thought alongside T.W. Adorno’s conception of the “culture industry.”. (shrink)

Though Benjamin and Adorno’s various engagements with mass media suggest many possibilities for constructing approaches to descriptive and prescriptive critique, they have remained underexplored in media theory. Taken together, Adorno and Benjamin’s often incompatible views on the social significance of technological mediation offer a powerful framework for critical analysis of the political economies of contemporary socio-technological systems and practices, including mass online education, and for addressing persistent forms of technological determinism.

La ficción narrativa tiene el poder de alterar nuestras más arraigadas intuiciones y expectativas acerca de lo que significa seguir una vida éticamente buena, así como del tipo de sociedad que facilitaría tal situación. A veces su poder disruptivo es develador, lo cual lleva a un cambio éticamente significativo en la percepción. Sostengo que los poderes disruptivos y develadores de una ficción narrativa constituyen un potencial para el conocimiento ético. Interpreto este conocimiento como un proceso de aprendizaje, orientado por una (...) preocupación acerca de la verdad, que involucra la acción racional y el compromiso afectivo de un sujeto humano encarnado. Con el fin de mostrar esto, me enfrento de manera crítica a la lectura de Kafka realizada por Adorno, usando la historia de Kafka titulada “En la colonia penitenciaria” para desafiar tal análisis. (shrink)

This essay explores the works of German artist Gustav Metzger as a potential response to Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”). It argues that culture, as understood in the Adornian sense, is inextricably barbaric as a result of simply being after Auschwitz. Culture must acknowledge the finitude in its own ability to live up to an ethical demand in response to justice, whose arrival is infinitely deferred. In (...) spite of this, culture, and art in particular, must not refrain from the very act of writing. Metzger’s works are discussed as aesthetic responses to the “new categorical imperative” of Adorno, who addresses art’s failure in light of Auschwitz by pointing to aporias that constitute the inescapable condition of “barbarism.” This essay suggests that Metzger’s aesthetic articulations are nonbarbaric ruptures, in that they challenge our living on irresponsibly within the condition of barbarism via a constant confrontation with complicity. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which a fuller attention to suffering in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School might valuably inform international political thought. Recent poststructural writing argues that trauma is silenced to prevent it disrupting narratives of order and progress and instead advocates a continual ‘encircling’ of trauma that refuses incorporation into a broader historical narrative. This paper welcomes this challenge to mainstream international ethics: attention to particular suffering provides an important challenge to the abstraction, instrumentalism and (...) universalism of modernity. However, if we simply mark trauma and refuse to incorporate it into any kind of narrative, we cannot profit from the ways in which suffering can illuminate the structures and ways of thinking that create it. Drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics, the paper argues that a dialectical understanding of the relationship between universalising order and disrupting particularity can lead from individual suffering towards a political re-engagement with the universal. (shrink)

This article offers a new interpretation of Adorno’s new categorical imperative : it suggests that the new imperative is an important element of Adorno’s moral philosophy and at the same time runs counter to some of its essential features. It is suggested that Adorno’s moral philosophy leads to two aporiae, which create an impasse that the new categorical imperative attempts to circumvent. The first aporia results from the tension between Adorno’s acknowledgement that praxis is an essential part of moral philosophy, (...) and his view according to which existing social conditions make it impossible for moral knowledge to be translated into right action. The second aporia results from the tension between the uncompromising sensitivity to suffering that underlies Adorno’s moral thought, and his analysis of the culture industry mechanisms which turn people into happy, satisfied customers—an incompatibility which threatens to pull the rug out from under Adorno’s moral philosophy. My interpretation of the new categorical imperative focuses on two characteristics it inherits from the old, Kantian one—self-evidence and unconditionality—in order to present the new imperative as a response to these two aporiae. (shrink)

We analyse the way in which the Holocaust is taught in The Netherlands, with an emphasis on critically examining the content of secondary school textbooks used to teach Dutch students about the history of the Holocaust. We also interview Dutch educators, government officials and academics about the state of Dutch Holocaust education. Our findings indicate that Dutch students are underexposed to the Holocaust and lack basic knowledge and conceptual understanding of it. Fundamental concerns regarding the civic obligations of citizens in (...) a democracy and basic principles of human rights that are raised by the history of the Holocaust in The Netherlands are often ignored or examined superficially, sometimes because of ambivalence about the extent of Dutch involvement in the genocide of Dutch Jewry. Little attention is paid to the complex moral choices that Dutch citizens faced during the Second World War and the life-or-death implications such decisions had for Dutch Jews. Finally, Jewish history and culture and the history of European anti-Semitism are rarely addressed in textbooks and history lessons about the Holocaust, undermining efforts to sensitise students to the implications of the Holocaust for The Netherlands and for Europe as a whole. In our conclusion, we offer some models of Holocaust education that could significantly improve the quality and content of Dutch Holocaust education. (shrink)

It is clear that we have to do something in our time concerning global warming yet before we can actually change the world, we must first understand our world. According to Heidegger, technology itself is not good or bad, but the problem is, that technological thinking (calculative thinking) has become the only form of thinking. Heidegger saw that the essence of technology nowadays is enframing – Ge-stell, which means that everything in nature is ‘standing-reserve’ (Bestand). Enframing (as apparatus) is one (...) way of uncovering, which for Heidegger meant truth. Truth can appear in many ways and the danger is that this truth of representational-calculative thinking becomes the only truth. We claim that the calculative way of thinking must be changed and we posit that Gelassenheit (slow thinking, releasement, letting-go) is the remedy. It does not mean some kind of mysticism or irrationality. The notion of Gelassenheit includes the idea of to let learn. We as teachers and educators have to learn how to think outside of the technological ‘Ge-stell’ and start thinking and acting in radically new ways. Like Arne Naes and Michael Zimmerman we connect the overcoming of technological ‘Ge-stell’ with so called deep ecology. We have to ‘learn to think’ and act within the deep ecology. We call for an educational ecological imperative. Every teacher and educationalist has to think what they can do (not as private person but as professionals) in order to prevent the coming eco-catastrophe. (shrink)

The article takes critiques of the entanglement of law with violence as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of a ‘tertium of law’. It thereby seeks to overcome the dichotomous basic assumptions that see law as always oscillating between an apology for violence on the one hand, and a utopia of reason on the other. The text analyses the possibility of this ‘tertium’, a ‘legal force’ beyond legal violence and legal reason, in four steps, drawing on the work (...) of Jacques Derrida and authors of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It argues that in a first step law needs to be dissociated from the State. The violence of law, however, does not stem solely from law’s ties with State power. Law itself is violent even where it is not State law. The second step of legal critique thus needs to consist in the commemoration of legal violence, followed by a third that demands the transformation of violence to force. These three instances of critique are the precondition for a last and essential step according to which a critique of law must facilitate the transcendence of legal violence by taking law and its promise of justice at its word in order to turn this promise against law itself. (shrink)

In his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno remarks that “tragedy, which may have been the origin of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, was an afterimage of cultic acts that were intended to have real effects.” This statement and its Kantian undertones are the basis for this essay, which will take up the question of the origin of the idea of tragedy in order to elucidate the basis for Adorno’s thinking on aesthetic autonomy. I will discuss Kant’s concept of human reason and (...) its relationship to the autonomous will and the concept of necessity in order to show that the notion of humanity grounds the idea of tragedy and that without a focus on the human in matters of autonomy, tragedy is a lost art form. Finally, I will undertake to tease out the metaphysical and aesthetic aspects of tragedy in a discussion oriented towards Adorno’s relationship with metaphysics and the possibility of removing the Kantian block. The essay will conclude with a reflection on the mourning character of reason and its relation to Adorno’s “principle of Auschwitz” with a view to examining the metaphysical grounds for the tragic in modernity. (shrink)

The first systematic analysis of the Frankfurt School’s research and theorizing on modern antisemitism. Although the Frankfurt School represents one of the most influential intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, its multifaceted work on modern antisemitism has so far largely been neglected. The Politics of Unreason fills this gap, providing the first systematic study of the Frankfurt School’s philosophical, psychological, political, and social research and theorizing on the problem of antisemitism. Examining the full range of these critical theorists’ contributions, from (...) major studies and prominent essays to seemingly marginal pieces and aphorisms, Lars Rensmann reconstructs how the Frankfurt School, faced with the catastrophe of the genocide against the European Jews, explains forms and causes of anti-Jewish politics of hate. The book also pays special attention to research on coded and “secondary” antisemitism after the Holocaust, and how resentments are politically mobilized under conditions of democracy. By revisiting and rereading the Frankfurt School’s original work, this book challenges several misperceptions about critical theory’s research, making the case that it provides an important source to better understand the social origins and politics of antisemitism, racism, and hate speech in the modern world. Lars Rensmann is Professor of European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His books include Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (coedited with Samir Gandesha). (shrink)

My response to Tyson Lewis’s book concentrates on two themes, seemingly peripheral to the book’s explicit content: the pertinent question of (educational) violence and the related problem of instrumentalism. I try to tackle both of them by outlining the dispute between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. The choice of Schmitt as the background for these peripheral commentaries is not accidental. The premise of Lewis’s book is that there is a link between fascism and 21st century populism and authoritarianism (in the (...) US, France, and Germany, but – as I would argue – much more prevalent in Hungary and Poland). The European version is, if not intellectually connected, then at least somehow coincident with the renaissance of the thought of the German jurist of the Weimar and Nazi era. Benjamin’s antifascist potential depends also on his power of de-potentializing Schmitt’s political theology, concepts of sovereignty and state of exception. (shrink)

Why should contemporary aesthetic production be concerned with making time, rather than history, appear? Vincent Adiutori argues that contemporary aesthetic production’s imperative is to produce rather than resolve contradiction. At a time when making history appear would seem the political task par excellence, to make time appear—as he argues Cormac McCarthy’s The Road does—is the negative task of aesthetics read politically. In short, irony is to time as allegory is to history.

This article tries to defend the position that Holocaust Education can be enriched by appreciating laughter and humor as critical and transformative forces that not only challenge dominant discourses about the Holocaust and its representational limits, but also reclaim humanity, ethics, and difference from new angles and juxtapositions. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel The Nazi and the Barber is discussed here as an example of literature that departs from representations of Holocaust as celebration of resilience and survival, portraying a world in which (...) lies, hatred and violence are still perpetuated. Because of its transgressive qualities, Hilsenrath’s narrative of the Holocaust as a satire with elements of black comedy can offer pedagogical openings for using laughter to interrupt normative constructions of the Holocaust as an unspeakable and sacred event that lies outside history, and thus beyond the capacities of human understanding. It is argued that laughter is an important modality for inviting deep thinking about the Holocaust, to move it from a transcendent phenomenon to an immanent event, situated clearly in the realm of human action and worthy of understanding so as to prevent it from happening again. (shrink)

This thesis is a discussion of Theodor Adorno's concept of the "addendum". In contrast to Immanuel Kant who claimed that free and moral action amounts to pure reason alone being the cause of action, Adorno believes that a physical impulse is required for action to take place. This thesis begins by discussing Kant's philosophy in the first chapter and moves to a discussion of the addendum in the second. In the third chapter I discuss the addendum's place in Adorno's moral (...) philosophy. In that there is always a physical component involved in action, Adorno believes that some materially motivated action can be morally good. Specifically, it is the impulsive response to suffering and physical pain that Adorno believes is morally good because, as I suggest, it is only by so responding that the Holocaust can be prevented from happening again. (shrink)

The Shadow of Totalitarianism develops a new way to think about the problem of evil in politics. Beginning with the commonplace idea that the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century marked the emergence of a new form of evil, Javier Burdman finds early seeds of thinking about this form in Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. Far from being an isolated object of inquiry, evil, Burdman argues, has long shaped and been central to philosophical understandings of political action and judgment. Systematically (...) analyzing the relationship between evil, action, and judgment in the work of Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, The Shadow of Totalitarianism aligns evil in politics with a desire for moral certainty, hence the emphasis on the need to accept and affirm uncertainty in current ethical theories. The careful philosophical analysis through which Burdman develops this inquiry contributes to a better understanding of some of the theoretical complexities involved in the problem of evil and provides conceptual tools with which to approach it. (shrink)

This article presents Theodor W. Adorno's concept of education, the basis of which is critical self-reflection. It argues that a close reading of Adorno's various writings on education yields a theory of critical self-reflection that is not simply introspection but an analysis of the social totality. Beginning with Adorno's assessment of education within capitalism – which is always a critique of capitalism itself – the article moves through his concept of critical self-reflection, and concludes by reassessing his claim that an (...) education for critical self-reflection offers the strongest barrier to the recurrence of Auschwitz. (shrink)

In adult education there is always a problem of prefabricated and in many respect fixed opinions and views of the world. In this sense, I will argue, that the starting point of radical education should be in the destruction of these walls of belief that people build around themselves in order to feel safe. In this connection I will talk about ‘gentle shattering of identities’ as a problem and a method of radical education. When we as adult educators are trying (...) to gently shatter these solidified identities and pre‐packed ways of being and acting in the world, we are moving in the field of questions that Sigmund Freud tackled with the concepts of ‘de‐personalization’ and ‘de‐realization’. These concepts raise the question about the possibility of at the same time believing that something is and at the same time having a fundamentally sceptical attitude towards this given. In my article I will ask, can we integrate the idea of learning in general with the idea of strangeness to oneself as a legitimate and sensible experiential point of departure for radical learning? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses dialectics as a method of critique which takes concepts it primal object of inquiry. Through a reading of Theodor W. Adorno’s lecture course Introduction to Dialectics, it argues that for dialectical critique concepts are living organs of social reality whose work must observed in terms of constellations of experiences and practices, and through specific historical sites and social processes. The article reconstructs three moments in Adorno’s thinking of critique’s relation to conceptuality: the “pedagogical effect” of concepts on (...) our habits of thought, the socio-historical formation of concepts as “fields of force”, and the need of a “micrological method” of engagement with social reality. Within this framework, the article shows that the movement of dialectical critique is prompted by the cognitive utopia of using concepts to reach material reality, as well as by the ethical demand of making justice to what is not grasped by the existing conceptual order of society. By combining both moments, the goal of dialectical critique is not to identify the correct meaning of concepts, but to work through them as to unlock the normative imagination of society. (shrink)

In the aftermath of national or international tragedies, appeals for action such as, “Never Forget” or “Never Again” are ubiquitous. Theodor Adorno makes a similar call in the wake of the Holocaust, proclaiming that all education should be focused on the prevention of another genocide. While most would agree with such a statement, practically how do we respond to such a call, specifically in light of Adorno’s work? Answering this question is at the heart of this project and I argue (...) that imaginative memorials can fulfill Adorno’s criteria for post-Auschwitz education. I first present a theory of moral imagination by relying on contemporary accounts of the theory and then show how it complements Adorno’s work, specifically by offering an explanatory foundation to a number of his claims. I reveal that many of Adorno’s observations about the world are supported by recent advancements in the understanding of imagination and I argue that the combination of contemporary accounts of moral imagination and Adorno’s thought are mutually beneficial. After the two theories have been sufficiently discussed and integrated, I focus on Adorno’s arguments regarding education following Auschwitz. Adorno argues that we should investigate how such a horror could occur, and the people who committed the acts of genocide. Such information will be helpful for the prevention of another Auschwitz because we can attempt to overcome the values and ideas of those who perpetrated genocide. This dissertation is unique and of philosophical importance because it fleshes out Adorno’s discussion of the characteristics that led to the Holocaust and argues for a specific form of education that meets all of the criteria of Adorno’s post-Auschwitz education: memorials that stimulate the visitor’s imagination. In order to make this point, I highlight specific Holocaust memorials that are imaginative and argue for their efficacy. My goal for the project is to actualize Adorno’s post-Auschwitz education initiative through imaginative memorials. (shrink)

Inspired by the Studies on authoritarian personality and based on contemporary research on authoritarianism in Brazil, we will analyze the construction of the idol aura surrounding former president Bolsonaro, which allowed the far right to be elected and remain in power until the last elections in 2022. We see his rise as mostly due to the digital violence that largely benefited his campaign and was directed against the block of left-wing candidates. So as to clarify this issue, we will revisit (...) the sociohistorical and psycho-political fundamentals of the antidemocratic and ethnocentric behaviors spurred by that leadership that became idolized. We will also outline an emancipatory, antiracist, culturally relevant and decolonial education, as a way to provide what Adorno regarded as being the antidote to the reemergence of a regressive barbarism. In the case of Brazil, barbarism refers to the remnants of the slave system implemented in the country for three and a half centuries, whose destructive potential was awakened under Bolsonaro’s government, given the latent antidemocratic and authoritarian tendencies in our society. (shrink)

The dissertation attempts to answer the question of how to theorize resistance from within the philosophy of social science. To answer this question we must consider more than just the philosophy of social science; we also must look to political and moral philosophy. Resistance to the social norms of one’s community is possible to theorize from within the philosophy of social science once we develop a sufficiently nuanced account of social and moral communities, according to which membership in a community (...) is not defined by sharing judgments, conceptual frameworks, or comprehensive worldviews, but by sharing terms of discourse so that discussion about judgments, conceptual frameworks, and comprehensive worldviews is possible. Understanding the structure of one’s moral community is not the same as to endorsing that structure. This suggests that contestation is already present within communities about what ‘we’ do, up to and including who ‘we’—as a ‘community’—are. Challenging communitarian understandings of what makes a community a community, I argue that communities are best understood as forming around common concerns or perceptions of problems. This contestation plays a major role in determining the identities of communities, and these identities are constantly shifting. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

Organized across national boundaries and with millions of supporters worldwide, transnational environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Friends of the Earth play a central role in the way the world addresses environmental issues. This book provides the most systematic and theoretically informed study to date of the strategies these organizations use to advance global environmental protection. Based on case studies of three transnational groups, it argues that in addition to lobbying governments, activists operate within and (...) across societies to effect widespread change. They work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to alter corporate practices, educate vast numbers of people, pressure multilateral development banks, and shift standards of good conduct. Wapner argues that because this activity takes place outside the formal arena of inter-state politics, environmental activists practice "world civic politics"; they politicize global civil society. The theoretical import of this book is to bring the practice of world civic politics into sharp relief and generalize its significance beyond environmental affairs to explain the efforts of all NGOs in world politics. (shrink)

This paper examines the loss of culture as a possible effect of the neoliberalisation of education, especially higher education. The paper opens with a brief comparison between the humanistic education founded on the idea of culture and its modern-day neoliberal form, with the help of José Ortega y Gasset’s reflections on the mission of higher education. It then discusses certain aspects of the historical development of libraries and of the figure of the public intellectual with a view to bringing into (...) relief some negative repercussions that can, and already do affect the university. The paper also explores aspects of John Dewey’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s thoughts to draw lessons with respect to how experience and culture are not only essential components of education as a whole, but also elements of resilience amidst a series of contemporary challenges that threaten its purpose and meaning. The paper draws to a close with some suggestive yet inconclusive remarks on the promises inherent in existing and possible alternatives to the neoliberalised university. (shrink)

In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from (...) the past by returning to the moral character of our existence and our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study. (shrink)

The analysis is based on some moral experiences taking place during a terrorist attack on the Norwegian Labor Party’s youth camp on the island of Utøya July 22, 2011, where 69 young people were killed and several seriously injured. After the attack many of the survivors told stories of how strangers spontaneous had helped and cared for each other. In the midst of the horror there occurred sudden “moments of goodness” or “points of light” that revealed hope for the persons (...) involved, as well as for the society. The article examines these spontaneous moral practices in light of moral educational theory, as well as discusses the terrorists own way of thinking and acting. The spontaneous practices point toward another basis for a moral approach then a cognitive development tradition. The importance of community is underlined, as well as an interpersonal dimension. In the last section the fostering of moral and ethical thinking and acting is discussed in light of general education and the three functions of education proposed by Biesta. It is suggested that moral education could contribute something to all of the three dimensions but based on the experiences from Utøya, there will be a particular emphasis on the subjectification function of education. (shrink)