Renz Villacampa

The school has become the new sanctuary where the high altar of production is erected. In this setting, technical skills are delegated a kind of grand merit, especially those that produce job-ready learners sent as ‘supply-response’ to the labor gap of highly developed countries. This brand of education has become incessantly evident in the Philippines. In this paper, I offer a dismal image of an education depleted with its humanistic vocation. Offering a preliminary diagnosis, I point to two problematic conditions: (1) the dislocated view of labor as an instrument for production, primarily in the academe and, later, in the labor force; (2) the misplaced exercise of attention in the academe, which exacerbates the devaluation of labor. To ground these claims, I provide their iterations in the Philippine academe, such as the overbearing reach of instrumental rationality and the threat of curriculum hierarchy. Using Weil as an interlocutor, I followed her emphasis on attention as the real object of learning. I do this by critically examining the directions taken by the Philippine education system and the lessons it renders to arrive at an education that is attentive to its humanist character: orienting learners back to themselves and towards the others outside.

Confined in spatiotemporal structures and relations, the body is caught in the linearity of economic production and the rigidity of ideological imperatives. In this setup, the objectiveness of the body is suspected of putting a person to a limit. This further interrogates and accuses the body of facilitating its own objectification. Here, I challenged prominent objections to the objectiveness of the body, particularly those coming from Marcel and the early/material feminist traditions. I then put forward a case in which the active-operative instrumentalization of the body is legitimized sans discounting the body as an addendum or mere physical extension. Further, I qualify the ‘use’ of the body as a corporealized medium and embodied instrument that activates a profound encounter and sharing of the world with other bodies.

Bestrewn with relics of subjugation, the frameworks that hinge on social progress have failed to appraise the plight of the marginalized in the democratic discourse. This is the case in the Philippines, as in other fringed spaces caught in hegemonic world-building. In this setup, emancipation is anchored in salvific attempts – salvaging the marginalized from a messianic standpoint. This tends to produce a pejorative image of the marginalized as incapable of self-determination. I argue in a three-part discussion: (1) reexamine the locus of the margin in critical theorizing; (2) retrace the act of recognition vis-à-vis the emancipative struggle; (3) present that the lifeworld of the marginalized offers redemptive alternatives for emancipation. Further, I argue that this offers a foremost framework in critical theorizing at the margin since their situatedness affords a stance that has not formed a patina of the West but is primarily informed by their rich local periphery.