The problem with deviance -- Reject all disciples: ancient cynicism and fearless speech -- Deface the currency: ancient cynicism beyond the pale -- Fear the mob: antique and medieval idealizations -- Drain the barrel: early modern malcontents -- Unchain the sun: enlightened philosophers and libertines -- Live the end times: the many faces of modern cynics -- The inevitability of cynicism.

This paper argues that the dominant modes of academic address, the conference paper, the journal article, and the monograph, reinforce problematic and exclusionary assumptions concerning what counts as legitimate research, whilst also restricting academic enquiry and impoverishing intellectual life. It makes its case by exploring in some detail the intellectual commitments of one the West’s more wayward 20th century thinkers, Georges Bataille. It suggests that Bataille presents not simply a conceptual armoury (and one among many) for critiquing Western logocentrism from (...) within, but offers an example of what a less domesticated, less stylistically narrowed mode of thinking might look like. (shrink)

This paper examines Michael Young's 1958 dystopia, The Rise of the Meritocracy. In this book, the word 'meritocracy' was coined and used in a pejorative sense. Today, however, meritocracy represents a positive ideal against which we measure the justice of our institutions. This paper argues that, when read in the twenty-first century, Young's dystopia does little to dislodge the implicit appeal of a meritocratic society. It examines the principles of education and administrative justice upon which meritocracy is based, suggesting that (...) since 1958 those principles have changed. Young's warning no longer has any effect on us because the meritocratic system it warns us against has been transformed. (shrink)

Education is a violent act, yet this violence is concealed by its good intent. Education presents itself as a distinctly improving, enabling practice. Even its most radical critics assume that education is, at core, an incontestable social good. Setting education in its political context, this book, now in paperback, offers a history of good intentions, ranging from the birth of modern schooling and modern examination, to the rise (and fall) of meritocracy. In challenging all that is well-intentioned in education, it (...) reveals how our educational commitments are always underwritten by violence. Our highest ideals have the lowest origins. Seeking to unsettle a settled conscience, Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason is designed to disturb the reader. Education constitutes us as subjects; we owe our existence to its violent inscriptions. Those who refuse or rebel against our educational present must begin by objecting to the subjects we have become. (shrink)

Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over the role (...) of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘ Why fight?’ The terms of this debate are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. ‘ Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘ How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field. (shrink)

This paper argues against dominant philosophical interpretations of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener and submits it to an educational reading. It problematizes readings (such as those of...