Igor Jasinski

In the last chapter, I took a first step toward gauging the relevance of Agamben’s concept of infancy for an idea of education that contains the possibility of a suspension of the logic of learning (education as a mere transfer of knowledge or skills, aimed at specific ends) within the law of education, and how we might think of this experience that allows for an openness to new and different ways of speaking (thinking and acting) as educationally beneficial in a general sense. But since for Agamben, the experience of possibility/infancy happened outside of traditional educational settings, involving a variety of activities such as watching movies, writing, doing philosophy, the question is what kind of more specifically educational activity could allow for a more fully realized experience in an educational context. As we have already seen, the term Agamben uses to refer to activities that allow for an experience of infancy is study.

The question we asked at the end of the last chapter is why the idea of education we find in Agamben’s life and work should be thought of as preferable to other forms of life. So far, the answer has been largely implicit: In the first part, we saw how Agamben’s own life—the life of a studier—could be regarded as desirable, based on how it is experienced (and articulated) by him. At the end of the second chapter, we gave a preliminary answer to the question of the significance of infancy for education—saying that a more fully developed experience of infancy would mean more openness toward new ways of speaking (thinking and acting), which could be considered valuable by itself, especially if we see education as more than the mechanical transmission of knowledge and skills. We then identified the idea of ease as one of the facets of study and characterized the in-tentional classroom community as a community based on love and friendship—with an underlying assumption that ease, love, and friendship could be considered to be, by themselves, desirable. The purpose of this chapter is to be more explicit about why—from an Agambenian perspective—we should think of the form of life exemplified by in-tentional educational communities as preferable to those aimed at the realization of common goals and objectives. Which is part of the larger question of why a society based on the idea of use rather than appropriation should be thought of as preferable to the alternatives. I begin by outlining Agamben’s strategy of arguing for the life of the studier as a happy (or happier) life (5.2). I then present Agamben’s idea of happiness as a form of living contemplation (5.3) and consider what this means for the possibility of individual (5.4) and communal (5.5) happiness in education.

It is customary in a monograph such as this one to provide biographical information to get to know the man or woman behind the work, in order to better understand the origin and formation of his or her ideas, and to reveal the human—and maybe all too human—side of a prominent thinker. In Agamben’s case, the problem is that we have only very little information about what is commonly considered a personal life. It is not that Agamben’s life lacks personal experiences or relationships but that those are so closely tied to his work that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the two. As David Kishik has observed, “neither Agamben’s ‘life’ nor his ‘work’ can really make a lot of sense independently of one another, because they both operate in the zone of indetermination that we call a ‘lifework’” (2012, p. 3). That this closeness between his life and his work as a writer is not unintentional can be gleaned from his assertion that “life is only what is made in speech” (EP, p. 81). While we should not take this to mean that, for Agamben, language is all there is (in contrast to Derrida, for Agamben there is life “outside the text”), it is certainly true that he sees the use of language as an essential and constitutive feature of a human life. This also means that instead of searching for clues about his ideas in “so-called real life” (EP, p. 82), to better understand his work, we need to look at what it means to lead a life that is “made in speech.”

If applying Agamben’s idea of study to formal education settings, in general, may have seemed like a stretch, the educational commons—that is, the traditional (content-area) classroom, lecture hall, or seminar room, with specific places and times for educational encounters, a particular subject-matter, and lesson plans directed at predetermined outcomes—would appear to be even less suitable and less conducive to study, from an Agambenian perspective. Instead of the spatial and temporal gaps and intervals, what is at issue here are gaps in the curriculum, that is, in the content (or subject-matter) of education. But given that the whole point of spatial and temporal gaps was to leave undetermined what may happen in them to allow for the possibility of study, the question is, how we can conceive of a studious curriculum at all?

When we think of places to study, it is typically not classrooms, lecture halls, or seminar rooms that come to mind. It may still happen there, if an instructor ends the seminar early or when the substitute teacher hasn’t received any instructions and declares the class a “study hall,” or when students use a classroom after the end of the school day. But the way we commonly think of it, studying takes place outside of and between places specifically designated for teaching and learning: in the library, the student lounge, in hallways, the cafeteria, the schoolyard, on the school bus or a commuter train, in a coffee shop, or the living room couch. And while we might think of studying primarily as a solitary activity, it is also done with or alongside others, in homework clubs or study groups. And if we broaden our use of the term even just slightly, we may include conversations with friends or family members, a librarian, the school custodian, or a store clerk. The question considered in this chapter is how the way we think of the spatial features of educational institutions can inspire study in such a broader and/or a specifically Agambenian sense—namely as an activity that is not just auxiliary to what is happening in the spaces designated for learning (cramming for a test, doing research for a term paper), but one that is—broadly speaking—done for its own sake.

Similar to the way we think of spaces suitable for studying (generally understood), the natural time for studying is that between times specifically allotted to learning: between class periods, at the beginning or at the end of the school day, during recess or lunch break, or on our commute to or from campus. And in a somewhat broader sense of studying, we may think of field trips, school vacations, semester breaks, or gap years, given that such times are typically less structured, with less pressure to produce specific results or outcomes. But as we have seen in the previous chapter (with regard to school design), these in-between times—whether during official school or university hours or after hours—are still part of the temporal structure of the school or the university, and—more generally—the chronological time of lifelong learning in the learning society. This means that whatever kind of studying may be happening during these periods is likely to remain auxiliary to learning or may turn into the opposite: playtime or time off from education altogether. In other words, what we need to look for, in terms of times for study in an Agambenian sense, are the gaps, or—in this case—intervals, that fundamentally interrupt and make inoperable the official temporal architecture of the school or the university (reusing time, making different use of time designated for learning or the support of learning).

Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben may be best known for his political writings concerning the curtailing of privacy rights in the wake of 9/11 and the status of prisoners of war and refugees. Yet, casting him primarily as a political theorist is misleading given his significant contributions to the fields of linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and religious studies. This book provides the first ever comprehensive introduction to Agamben’s work as it pertains to the field of education. Written in a clear and accessible style, Giorgio Agamben: Education without Ends is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in thinking education beyond its current standardized forms. The first part of the book creates a context by highlighting formative experiences in Agamben’s biography that reflect a particular idea of education on the threshold between life and work. The second part introduces the notions of infancy, study, community, and happiness, and discusses their relevance with regard to key issues in educational theory and practice. The third part shows how conceptual constellations based on Agamben’s work can inspire studious practices within the spatial, temporal, and curricular infrastructure of educational institutions as they exist today.

Educational theorists ranging from Ivan Illich to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons have described institutionalized schooling as a modernized, secular church, full of rituals, sacraments, and various incantations. For them, the function of the teacher as priest and schooling as baptism is highly problematic, separating education from the common world. As such, the educational theology of the school needs to be suspended in order for educational life to take on new meaning beyond the sacraments of learning. To further this line of inquiry, we turn to the work of Giorgio Agamben on the oath and its originary function of guaranteeing the truthfulness of language. Insofar as the oath is also operable in learning, we argue that such operability can be suspended through a dialogic practice called ‘community of infancy’, thereby making possible new, profane forms of educational life beyond baptism.

While some argue that the only way to make a place for Philosophy for Children in today's strict, standardised classroom is to measure its efficacy in promoting reasoning, we believe that this must be avoided in order to safeguard what is truly unique in P4C dialogue. When P4C acquiesces to the very same quantitative measures that define the rest of learning, then the philosophical dimension drops out and P4C becomes yet another progressive curriculum and pedagogy for enhancing argumentation skills that can easily be appropriated by any content area. What we want to offer in this article is a reevaluation of P4C that remains faithful to a radical kernel that we find when we do philosophy with children and young adults. To theorise the potential for P4C, we draw heavily on Agamben's work, and in particular his reflections on speech and infancy. We propose that the redemption of P4C necessitates a shift from a community of inquiry to a community of infancy. Such a community is not a community that operates according to predefined rules or standardised assessment protocols but rather is an inoperative community that is defined by letting ends idle. On our account, a community of infancy is an example of dialogic studious play that is neither ritual nor just play, thus avoiding the extreme polarities of the ritualised classrooms of high-stakes testing and the ‘ludic’ postmodern classroom of free play. What is at stake here is to preserve the last vestige of freedom within the school.

In this paper, I argue that potentialism is uniquely able to articulate the value of educational practices that lack the kind of directionality commonly associated with educational activities. It does so by operating with radically different assumptions about the nature and value of education – assumptions that can be derived from the basic premise of progressive education that education needs to be rooted in experience. I follow here a line of thought that leads from Dewey’s notion of experience aimed at new and better experiences, to Ivan Illich’s emphasis on the experience of the new, to Gert Biesta’s idea that education needs to allow students to bring something new into the world, to Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ emphasis on the experience of the possibility of the new. Finally, drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Tyson E. Lewis, I show how a potentialist notion of experience operates with a different temporality, enabling us to think of the experience of the potentiality of the new as such as what accounts for the educational value of non-directional practices – not only in spite of, but because of their lack of directionality.

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.