In this article, I explore the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality for rethinking education. While potentiality has been a long-standing concern for educational practitioners and theorists, Agamben’s work is unique in that it emphasizes how potentiality can only be thought of in relation to impotentiality. This moment of indistinction—what I refer to as im-potential—has important implications. First, I argue that if potentiality and impotentiality are separated from one another, the result is a stratified educational system where some students (...) are commanded to actualize their potentiality in the form of standardized tests while others are abandoned by the system. Second, thinking im-potentiality enables us to move beyond problematic formulations of learning and rediscover the uniqueness of studying. Here, I offer a brief example of study through an analysis of ‘Tinkering Schools’, an alternative program founded by Gever Tulley in San Francisco. And finally, without a concept of im-potentiality, the discourse of the ‘child genius’ becomes commodified as a power to be harnessed and actualized in the name of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. Only through a return to im-potentiality can we reclaim Genius and its relationship to the question of educational freedom. (shrink)

The Hegel-Deleuze relation has usually been considered as one of opposition, because of Deleuze’s explicit anti-Hegelian statements. This article refutes the main conceptual grounds to this opposition: the critique of the negative and of the circle of return. It aims to present the possibilities offered by considering the Hegel-Deleuze relation as a problematic, productive one. “Hegel-Deleuze” would be a relation prior to the supposed terms. To achieve this, we bind them through the concept of Idea. This traditional concept of philosophy, (...) which crowns the Hegelian system (also known as absolute idealism), appears in a key position in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It allows Deleuze to consider thought not as an image of the external reality or the condition of possible experience, but as the genetic principle of real experience. Even if Deleuze accuses Hegel of positing his Idea as the ground for the eternal repetition of the same, this article proposes to interpret it as the source of creation of a reality always different from itself. (shrink)

Popular filmic and literary stereotypes of teachers from Brodie and Chips to Keating and Schneebly have not only reflected a public desire for radically innovative and perverse teaching practices, but also created those paradigms in ways that are not always readily identifiable or traceable. This article seeks to analyse tensions between traditional institutional protocols and contemporary populist opinion on the role of the effective teacher. In doing so, the article takes Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) as a primary example (...) of those tensions and argues for a perverse ‘foolosophical’ view of pedagogical performance and a new appreciation for the necessity of ignorance in the classroom. Since ignorance and understanding are not taken as unambiguous antonyms, the article proposes that effective teaching and learning occur most effectively in the interstices between humility and hospitality. (shrink)