In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and measurable forms, study emphasizes the experience of potentiality, freed from predetermined outcomes. Studying suspends and interrupts the conventional logic (...) of learning, opening up a new space and time for educational freedom to emerge. Drawing upon the work of Italian philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, Lewis provides a conceptually and poetically rich account of the interconnections between potentiality, freedom, and study. Through a mixture of educational critique, phenomenological description, and ontological analysis, Lewis redeems study as an invaluable and urgent educational experience that provides alternatives to the economization of education and the cooptation of potentiality in the name of efficiency. The resulting discussion uncovers multiple forms of study in a variety of unexpected places: from the political poetry of Adrienne Rich, to tinkering classrooms, to abandoned manifestos, and, finally, to Occupy Wall Street. By reconnecting education with potentiality this book provides an educational philosophy that undermines the logic of learning and assessment, and turns our attention to the interminable paradoxes of studying. The book will be key reading for scholars in the fields of educational philosophy, critical pedagogy, foundations of education, composition and rhetoric, and critical thinking and literacy studies. (shrink)

This paper reassesses a perennial concern of philosophy of education: the nature of the educational community and the role of the teacher in relation to such a community. As an entry point into this broader question, we turn to Philosophy for children, which has consistently emphasized the importance of community. Yet, not unlike pragmatist notions of community more broadly, the P4C community has largely focused on the goal-directed, purposive, aspect of the process of inquiry. The purpose of our paper is (...) to move beyond P4C in order to theorize a non-instrumental, in-tentional, educational community without pre-conceived goals or intentions. Drawing largely from the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, we describe the P4C-classroom as one that refuses to be operative and thus undermines the taken-for-granted logic of means and ends that underlies how educational communities are typically depicted and justified. Again drawing from Agamben, we identify the specific ways in which the experience of love and friendship constitute the in-tentional community. The silence of the voice of the teacher enables the experience of love and friendship to come about. Being included as an exclusion via his/her silence, the teacher is neither immanent nor transcendent but alongside the community as a paradigm of friendship. (shrink)

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

This article explores the uses of Agamben’s philosophy for understanding the educational meaning of practices that typically take/took place at school, such as the collective rehearsal of the alphabet or the multiplication tables. More precisely, I propose that these forms of ‘practising’ show what schooling, as a particular and historically contingent institution, is all about. Instead of immediately assessing the ‘practice of practising’ in terms of learning outcomes, I turn to Bollnow’s attempt to analyze this phenomenon in a substantially educational (...) way, which for him essentially consists in opposing practising and learning. I show that his analysis is superficial and that we need Agamben’s notion of ‘potentiality’ in order to come to grips with the sense of this phenomenon. This will allow to see that practising concerns an uncommon way to relate to a subject matter that makes possible a transformation of individual and collective existence. The main objective of this investigation is not to hold a plea for reintroducing obsolete pedagogical methods, but to rethink the very meaning of education. (shrink)

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language and all but one appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several central concerns of Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian (...) theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. (shrink)

I examine two startling claims attributed to some philosophers associated with Megara on the Isthmus of Corinth, namely: Ml. Something possesses a capacity at t if and only if it is exercising that capacity at t. M2. One can speak of a thing only by using its own proper A6yor;. In what follows, I will call the conjunction of Ml and M2 'Megaricism' .1 The lit­ erature on ancient philosophy contains several valuable discussions of Ml and M2 taken individually .2 (...) But there is no discussion of them together, much less of their logical relations. I intend to remedy that lack, and to show why it is a lack worth remedying. My aims are both philosophical and historical. Inevitably, in saying anything new and interesting about Megaric views, I will be adopting assumptions scarcely free from controversy, and indulging in quite a bit of charitable recon­ struction. But the resulting picture is of considerable interest. For it explains why, although Ml and M2 seem to have little to do with one another, it is in fact small wonder that anyone who held one would hold the other, for, as I attempt to show, they entail each other. It explains why the Megarics are associated in the primary literature with the names of such diverse philosophical ancestors as Parmenides and Protagoras. And it explains why, although they are both false, Ml and M2 were claims taken seriously by both Plato and Aristotle, who in developing their own views on modality and language saw reason to mention Megaricism, and to argue against it. (shrink)

Traversing the fields of pedagogy, philosophy, and political theory, this book develops a marxist theory of education that will be useful for academics and activists alike. The second edition includes two additional chapters as well as a new preface and revisions throughout.

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, educational researchers devoted increasing attention to the study of “active learning,” leading to a robust literature on the topic in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Meanwhile, during largely the same period, political theorists discovered the radical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, which soon after began to ripple through more radical forms of philosophy of education. While both the SoTL works on active learning and writings of “Agambenian” philosophers of education have offered new insights (...) into their respective fields, active learning has not yet received a systematic philosophical reflection and the community of Agambenian philosophy of education has not yet been systematized. This article addresses both gaps, first through an outline of existing Agambenian approaches to the philosophy of education and second by theorizing active learning as a form of “destituent potential.” The systematic reflection on the three threads of Agambenian philosophy of education—whatever, potentiality, and study—offers an introduction to less familiar readers, and the second section offers a model for how philosophical concepts can become theoretical tools for SoTL analysis. (shrink)

Within educational philosophy and theory, there has been an international re-turn to envision study as an alternative formation to disrupt the defining learning logic. As an enrichment, this paper articulates “Daoist onto-un-learning” as an Eastern form of study, drawing upon Roger Ames’s interpretation of the ancient Chinese correlative cosmology and relational personhood thinking. This articulation is to dialogue with the conceptualizations of study shared by Giorgio Agamben, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis, and unfolds in three steps. First, I examine how (...) their conceptualizations of study constrain the studier-doing-study logic as a commonsensical expression of “foundational individualism” and anthropocentric disordering. Second, re-invoking the ancient Chinese wisdom, I envision “Daoist onto-un-learning” as a non-individualistic and non-anthropocentric form of study, re-configuring study and learning no longer as two disparate, if not necessarily oppositional, formations but into a Daoist bipolar yin-yang movement. Finally, I story-tell my doctoral research experience as a Daoist onto-un-learning journey, a spiralling learning-study movement, to unpack the ways it suspends and overturns the modern-Western trap/trope of anthropocentric-foundational individualism. In so doing, this paper further internationalizes and supplements the current study scholarship in relation to learning in a way so-far hardly explored yet cross-culturally provocative. (shrink)

This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source towards which all citations point.

Inoperative Learning draws upon the movement towards a weak philosophy that is currently gaining ground in educational philosophy: this weak philosophy does not offer a set of solutions or guidelines for improving educational outcomes, but rather renders assumptions about the theory-practice coupling that is so popular in contemporary education inoperative. By arguing that such logic reduces education to merely instrumental ends, which can only be assessed in terms of predefined measurement tools, this book presents a challenge to contemporary notions of (...) education as learning. There are various forms of inoperative education that temporarily suspend the goal-directedness of learning. From the perspective of learning, the neutralization of progress, growth, and maturity would usually be seen as obstacles needing to be overcome on the path toward set goals. Yet Lewis argues that a serious investigation of inoperativity opens up possibilities that would be otherwise unavailable in a world fixated on the question of learning. In dialogue with philosophers (Agamben, Benjamin, and Esposito), as well as authors (Kafka and Walser), and qualitative researchers (Lather), Lewis turns our collective attention to what remains when concepts such as learning, child development, teacher effectivity, and personal growth are left idle. Inoperative Learning presents a radical rewriting of educational possibilities. It should therefore be of great interest to educational researchers and educational philosophers concerned with the question of alternative logics of education beyond learning. The book may also be of interest to educational policy specialists who are looking for new and innovative forms of critique and analysis. (shrink)

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025...

In this essay, Tyson Lewis theorizes current lockdown practices, zero‐tolerance policies, and No Child Left Behind initiatives in U.S. schooling by drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the concentration camp and the state of exception. Agamben’s theory of the camp provides a challenging, critical vantage point for looking at the ambiguities that emerge from the complex field of disciplinary procedures now prevalent in inner‐city, low‐income, minority schools, and helps to clarify what exactly is at stake in the symbolic (...) and sometimes physical violence of schooling. Key to understanding the primary relation between camp and classroom is Agamben’s framework of the biopolitical, which paradoxically includes life as a political concern through its exclusion from the political sphere. Here Lewis appropriates Agamben’s terminology in order to theorize the biopedagogical, wherein educational life is included in schooling through its abandonment. For Lewis, the theory of the camp is necessary to recognizing how schools function and, in turn, how they could function differently. (shrink)

Agamben’s potentiality, and Chinese dao, entail experiencing movement on being. This article presents our experiments with these movements in the context of pedagogy, putting at stake our mode of existence in thinking. We examine Agamben’s potentiality as an aporetic experience in pedagogy. We find echoes of dao movement in a controversial pedagogical event in China. Interlacing potentiality and dao with our experience of pedagogical thinking, each makes the other intelligible. We show that reasonings of pedagogy in the USA and China (...) repeat the very paradoxes and exclusions they seek to overcome. We also gesture towards a way that, suspending and holding pedagogical reasoning in being empty, welcomes what cannot be learned or taught. This way also offers an example for comparative education. (shrink)

In an effort to theorize educational logics that are oppositional to capitalism, this article explores what it means to study like a communist. I begin by drawing out the tight connection between learning and capitalism, demonstrating that education is not a subset but a motor of political-economic relations. Next, I turn to the concept of study, which is being developed as an educational alternative to learning. While studying represents an educational challenge to capitalism, I argue that there are political limitations (...) to studying for which we need to account. Specifically, studying is not in itself political, but only represents the possibility of politics. To make this claim and to address these limitations, I turn to Jodi Dean’s work on the communist Party. Dean posits the Party not as a master, director, or prophet, but as an infrastructure of affective intensity that maintains a gap in the order of things. I show that the Party is one way to organize and to defend study. Throughout the article, I illuminate the ways in which educational philosophers can contribute to political movement building by showing, developing, and refining the educational components of politics that many organizers and theorists neglect. (shrink)

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.

In this essay, I argue that the work of Giorgio Agamben provides us with a theory of studious play which cuts across many of the categories that polarize educational thought. Rather than either ritualized testing or constructivist playfulness, Agamben provides a model of what he refers to as studious play—a practice which suspends the logic of both ritual and play. In order to explore this notion of studious play, I first articulate Agamben’s fleeting remarks on the topic with an important (...) problematic found in his early, literary work: transmission. If ritual transmits cultural traditions to ensure continuity with the past, and play as constructivist invention makes such transmission impossible, then studious play transmits transmissibility itself as a pure potentiality. Studious play accomplishes this peculiar educational task by suspending without destroying traditional things: laws, signs, and so on. I end the essay with a consideration of the ontological status of suspended things, arguing that they are transformed into toys via the action of study. Finally, I give a literary example of studious play found in Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten in which the school itself is imagined to be a kind of toy. (shrink)

In this article Joris Vlieghe defends the view that technologies of reading and writing are more than merely instruments that support education, arguing that these technologies themselves decide what education is all about and that they form subjectivity in substantial ways. Expanding on insights taken from media theory, Vlieghe uses the work of Bernard Stiegler in order to develop a “technosomatic” account of literacy initiation, that is, a perspective that zooms in on the physical dimensions of how to operate writing (...) and reading technologies. He argues that that the bodily gestures and disciplines that constitute literacy give rise to a particular space of experience, which comes down to a heavily embodied, first-hand sense of what it means to be able to produce script. Vlieghe contends that the advent of digital writing and reading technologies implies a fundamental shift in this sense of ability, and that in order to understand digital literacy we need to take into account the technosomatic aspects of learning to read and write with digital media. (shrink)

In this article I bring Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever singularity’ into critical pedagogy. I take as my starting point the role of identity within critical pedagogy. I call upon Butler to sketch the debates around the mobilization of identity for political purposes and, conceding the contingent necessity of identity, then suggest that whatever singularity can be helpful in moving critical pedagogy from an emancipatory to a liberatory project. To articulate whatever singularity I situate the concept within the work in (...) which it appears, and then take a detour into Agamben’s general philosophical project. I propose that, for critical pedagogy to take whatever singularity seriously, it must uphold a respect for the ineffability of being, which entails in part the suspension of dialogue. To help flesh out what I mean by this proposal, I turn to a fragment of Lyotard’s philosophy and his critique of democracy. I conclude by addressing a pressing ontological critique of Agamben, which leads me to argue for a materialist appropriation of the figure of whatever singularity, one that is held in tension with ontological concerns of identity. (shrink)