Franco “Bifo” Berardi tells us that the current transformation of every domain of social life into economy has led to “the subjugation of the soul to work processes.” There is a newfound love of work and, consequently, writes Berardi, “no desire, no vitality seems to exist anymore outside of the economic enterprise.” Concerned as it once was with “fostering the soul,” and concerned as it now is with preparing students for the job market, what role might education have in Berardi’s (...) musings? Can “creativity,” “self-actualization” and “curiosity,” which are so valued in education, still speak and help foster a sense of the soul that exceeds economy and work? In this paper, I explore these questions by providing an account of what is at stake in Berardi’s conception of the soul and its subjugation to work. I draw on his ideas to critically appraise the seemingly-benign aspirations of the “creative class,” a term coined to signal a new era for human flourishing afforded by shifts towards personal creativity in the digital economy. I then move to consider how, in particular, the ubiquitous promotion of “creativity” and “curiosity” in education tends to replicate a form of learning that puts the soul to work, as it were, promoting a narrow, self-enterprising subject with a frantic instrumental orientation towards the world. I conclude with a discussion on how demands on learners, to be always curious, innovative, nimble and open to discovery lead to panic, collapse and depression: the diseases of the soul. (shrink)

In this article I draw on Lauren Berlant's notion of ‘cruel optimism’ to identify and untangle how the prevailing sense of ‘optimism’ in education works against our common hope or collective striving for what is educational in education. In particular, I discuss how the ‘cruel optimism’ that invites individuals to constantly innovate and improve themselves through ever more learning leads ultimately to a sense of ‘presentism’, ‘privation’ and ‘loneliness’, which comes to threaten the role that education plays in sustaining and (...) forging a common world. Proposing that education is where the concern with ‘passing-on’ properly takes place, I discuss how education can tend to and pine towards something larger and more durable than the individual acquisition of knowledge and skills that serve immediate transient interests. As an exemplar of a place of ‘passing-on’, I ask us to consider how education invites us to affirm the ‘living-on’ of the question of what it might mean to live together after all: to forge, sustain and pledge something of significance in common amidst what is constantly passing away. In this sense, I seek to gesture to the possibility of hope within education: a sensibility and affirmation for ‘passing-on’ and ‘sur-vivance’. Such a hope might help to address the cruel depravity and isolation affecting our time that is caught up in the ‘learnification of education’. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” (...) for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education? (shrink)

Whereas there are many aspects of Roger Simon’s thought that can be privileged, one of the most compelling points of entry for beginning to consider his legacy in the field of education, and beyond, lies with his concern for the difficult work of receiving and transmitting, of giving countenance to, the traces of those now absent. Indeed, in the last 20 years of his scholarly work, Simon pressed us to consider the pedagogical stakes in forging an ethical living relation with (...) the remnants of past and presently unsettled—ongoing—historical wrongs. Keenly aware of how memorial practices risk falling into facile assurances and deferrals, Simon emphasized the important work of “remembrance-learning,” in which the task is to learn how to ethically receive and translate the remnants of a difficult past in our present, so that we might be able to more thoroughly think our time. In this paper I provide an overview of a certain tendency in Simon’s later thinking, pointing to how his work on pedagogy, aesthetics, curation and collective study was motivated by a not so ordinary way of thinking that takes seriously the fact that the dead cannot bury the dead; that they need those in the present, those whose turn it is to do the work, to offer human significance and a human completion to what remains a remnant. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article explores the ethical consequences of the seemingly benign suggestion that the retelling of an event of state sponsored violence through the protocols of the law can provide a lesson/forum for fostering “discursive solidarity.” Focusing on the example of post‐dictatorship Argentina, the apparent pedagogical soundness of transmitting the traumatic event through legal commemoration will be complicated by considering how the law is employed as a mechanism for bracketing divisive memories and affects that interrupt the coherence of the national imaginary. (...) Underlining these issues will be a concern with the difficulty of historicizing abject affections, of interpreting and transmitting post‐traumatic rage through the intertextual web of normative allusions. The discussion grapples not only with the political/practical consequences of attempting to absorb and transmit (hermeneutically) the disavowed affects of a social traumatic event, but also speculatively gestures us to consider another sense of justice: one that provides the impetus to confront how we are obligated before that which is lost through our terms.1. (shrink)