September Programme

September 2022, Parrhesia, Berlin

One 10-hour course taught in person and online via Zoom. For any questions please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Payment may be made by credit card (via Paypal), Paypal, or offline Bank Transfer.

Each course runs for 2 hours per day for 5 days

Course Descriptions

Description

The Will to Learn: Ivan Illich, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou on the Equality of Intelligence

Learning is generally seen as a linear process aided by a teacher who has the knowledge necessary to guide the uncultivated mind. The crisis in education has thus set in, so the story goes, because of the challenges to knowledge in our ‘post-truth’, commodified  society. 

We will discuss three philosophers—Illich, Rancière and Badiou—who reconceptualize the question of education more radically. Providing us with precise conceptual tools, they show why this linear idea of education itself stultifies the learning process and impedes the path of intellectual emancipation. No wonder that the system of education runs counter to its stated principles. The exercise of intelligence, each argues, requires different conditions. 

Key works:

Jacques Rancière The Ignorant Schoolmaster

Alain Badiou Plato’s Republic

Ivan Illich Deschooling Society 

Lessons on the crisis in education from three contemporary philosophers

Wherein lies the crisis in education? 

Days 1 and 2 explore Rancière’s path-breaking work The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The book recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French revolutionary and experienced teacher who made an important discovery while exiled in Belgium during the Restoration. At the centre of this story is the debunking of a certain pedagogical fiction – the linear model of learning. The main assertion repeated in this seminal work on the equality of intelligence is that the most perverse form of subjection occurs through the act of explaining itself. Yet what is teaching generally understood as if not a ‘giving of explanations’, that is a noble act of generosity through which the explainer enlightens the ‘explainee’ by giving him/her what they are lacking, that is, by bringing him/her to a higher level of knowledge and understanding? Jacotot/Rancière call for a radical break with the explanatory model – for them teaching is not about leading the ignorant, but of influencing the will, and most crucially of creating the conditions whereby the real problem of education is revealed: ‘not to transmit knowledge,  but to reveal an intelligence to itself’. Going beyond a critique of the explicative order and its dyad (the possessor of knowledge/the ignorant), they present the pedagogical relationship as one between two wills engaged in a process of verification of the fundamental equality of intelligences.

The notion of the ‘equality of intelligences’ is central to Rancière’s politics and aesthetics writings, to which we will create bridges. 

Days 3 and 4 explore Alain Badiou’s fascinating rewriting of Plato’s Republic. If, in Plato, the guardians have a specialized role that is allegedly best suited to ensuring justice in the ideal state, Badiou’s ‘hyper-translation’ updates the text: refuting any such specialized roles—which moves Badiou’s rendering of the guardian closer to a sort of Marxian polymorphous worker—it posits that each and every individual should be ‘equally involved in the state’. The ideal of justice and the welfare of the collective as a whole is the responsibility of each and every citizen. Here there are no philosopher kings because all citizens are philosophers and possess a shared view of the True. We will focus on the conditions that Badiou argues are needed for an education (‘by truths’), such as is suitable to this polymorphous figure of the guardian, and discuss how it diverges with current understandings of ‘democratic’ education.  

Day 5 discusses Ivan Illich’s work Deschooling Society. In an age where levels of student disaffection and anxiety are at unprecedented levels, where institutions are palpably betraying their own principles, where the commodification of education is progressing apace, Illich’s 1971 work has lost little of its relevance. We will discuss his claim that contemporary society, or learning, needs to be ‘deschooled’: the modern institution of the school runs counter to purpose and frustrates the will to learn, producing an alienation that is arguably more profound than that discussed by Marx. Illich maintains that the tenets of the modern school about what constitutes result in an institution that makes the school, not a place where learning can flourish, but a precondition for any position or privilege. The secular school gets caught in a self-justificatory logic: adherence produces a belief that is usually stronger than any confounding evidence; but should evidence leak through, then the performance of the ritual itself can be faulted (and calls made to intensify it). 

If schooling has become a perverse ritual or liturgy, inducing participants to overlook what they are actually doing, Illich seeks this development in the long history of the church within European society. The modern school is far from secular, the secular itself being a product of religious thinking.

Basing his arguments on a combination of institutional experimentation, sociological analysis, ecclesiology and philosophy, Illich, crucially, does not argue against schools per se, but rather for schools as places that are freely accessible to all and allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks that a person might propose to him- or herself. 

We will discuss his arguments around why ‘deschooling’ is necessary to the human adventure today and his proposals for shifting the educational process outside the usual forms of authority and hierarchy.

Description

Politics is all about speaking, that is about the social communication and discourses that generate and maintain social organization, the coordinated action of collectives. Aristotle famously established ‘logos’ (speech, discourse, rational communication) as the basis of the polis, the city, state or polity. Yet, even if speech opens up the dimension of politics, the actual political reality has been just as much connected or even predicated on not speaking. The biblical myth of the Tower of Babel narrates the beginning of human politics as arising from a rupture in communication.

This course will explore the notion of not speaking as a political, epistemological and social practice in twentieth-century theory, especially in view of decolonial discourse. We will look at texts that analyze conceptually but also actively perform the end of dialogue and the crisis of conversation in a paradoxical age of globally asserted epistemo-cultural fragmentation. From Martin Heidegger’s exchange with ‘the Japanese’ through Carl Schmitt’s anti-parliamentarism, including Frantz Fanon’s defense of anti-colonial violence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s nonspeaking subaltern and Jacques Derrida’s one-language-that-is-not-his-own. Through these texts we will reflect together on logoclastic features in patterns, structures, and practices of dialogue and non-dialogue deployed in contemporary politics, from nonviolent boycotts to the violence of war.

Texts:

Day 1 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009 [1932]), 29; translated by Georg Schwab as The Concept of the Political (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1996]).

Day 2 Martin Heidegger, 'Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache, zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden', Unterwegs zur Sprache (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003 [1959]), 84-155; translated by Peter Hertz as 'A Dialogue on Language, between a Japanese and an Inquirer', in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 1-54. 

Day 3 Frantz Fanon, ‘De la violence’, Les damnés de la terre (Paris : La découverte, 2002 [1961]), 37-103; translated by Constance Farrington as ‘Concerning Violence’, in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 35-106.

Day 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson/Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

Day 5 Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l'autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996); translated by Patrick Mensah as Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Description

Black Feminism: A Radical Introduction

Black feminism is sometimes reductively understood as tending to the specific problems of multiply marginalized groups, sorted by identity. There, the term ‘identity politics’ suggests an individualizing view of the social world – an impression confirmed by current discourses on identity politics and by neoliberal, reform-oriented appropriations of the term ‘intersectionality’. In contrast, this seminar will study Black feminism as a tradition of materialist social analysis and critique within which ‘identity' is not considered in isolation, but as a starting point and result of social struggles. As an ongoing articulation of the relationship between marginalized identities and resistance, Black feminisms hav always been embedded in broad emancipatory movements: abolitionism, workers movements, citizenship and migration. They might well provide a key perspective to connect them all.

We will read foundational texts of (mainly US) Black feminism in the context of social movements in which they were/are embedded. Sessions are thematically organized by sites of resistance, reaching from early abolitionism through reproductive justice to current border struggles. The goal of each session is to draw out and discuss analyses of the interplay of mechanisms of domination as well as the rich perspectives for transformation offered by the texts. 

Day1 Early abolitionism

In the first session we will read the landmark speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, held by abolitionist and civil rights activist Sojourner Truth in front of an audience of white women suffragists. Truth articulates her experience as an enslaved Black women and criticizes the notions of docile femininity and protected motherhood within white feminist activism. In ‘Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves’, Angela Davis writes about the specific role of Black women in resistance struggles against slavery.  

• Truth, Sojourner, 1991 (1851): ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ In: The Crisis. 106 (1), 31.
• Davis, Angela, 1972: ‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves’, in The Massachusetts Review, 13 (1/2), 81-100.

Day 2 Worker's movement

In the second session we will read the essay "An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women" by Claudia Jones, a Black feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist leader in the CPUSA (Communist Party USA). In 1949, she addressed the American left in a class-based analysis of the triple oppression and super-exploitation of Black women, whom she saw as the “most oppressed stratum of the whole population” due to their specific positioning as mothers and breadwinners in impoverished communities (Jones 2011, 75). Frances Beal updates this analysis in her 1969 essay by showing how the racialized differences within genders help to uphoald and conceal capitalist domination.

• Jones, Claudia, 2011: ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women’, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.) Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays, and Poems. Banbury.
• Beal, Frances, 2008 (1969): ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female’, Meridians, 8 (2), 166-176.

Day 3 Identity, difference and reproductive justice:

In the third session we will speak about the meaning of "identity politics" and the role of difference in Black feminist and intersectional theory and organizing - and for emancipatory movements in general. The Combahee River Collective were the first to explicitly use the term "identity politics" to describe a main feature of Black feminist organizing. Audre Lorde's speech "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House" continues this line of thinking with a strong argument against complacent versions of inclusion and diversity politics. Within feminist organizing, the insight in intersectional difference has led to a crucial revision of the struggle for reproductive rights. Instead of a narrow focus on abortion rights, the Black feminist agenda aims at overall reproductive justice.

• Combahee River Collective, 1979: ‘A Black Feminist Statement’, in Zillah Eisenstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, New York/London, 362-72.
• Lorde, Audre, 2007 (1984): ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, 110- 114. 
• Ross, Loretta J. (2017): ‘Reproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism’, in Souls. Vol. 19, No. 3 July-September 2017, 286-314.
• Gumbs, Alexis Pauline (2016): ‘m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering’, in Gumbs, Alexis Pauline/Martens, China/Williams, Mai'a (eds), Revolutionary Mothering, Oakland, CA, 19-31.

Day 4 Abolitionism and critiques of police violence

The fourth session will focus on more recent forms of abolitionist organizing and analysis. The INCITE!-Critical Resistance Statement marks a crucial moment of Black feminist intervention in the understanding of punitive institutions as well as the horizon of their overcoming. One crucial site of racist state violence is the police practice of racial profiling. Fatima El-Tayeb and Vanessa Thompson situate it in European colonial traditions and discuss the various contexts of activist resistance that have formed in the present conjuncture. The functioning of punitive institutions is closely linked with ableism. We trace these intersections by reading Vanessa Eileen Thompson’s analysis of policing the Black and differently abled body. Again, this account emphasizes the centrality of a Black feminist, inclusive and care-focused abolitionism.

• Critical Resistance and Incite!, 2003: ‘Critical Resistance-Incite! Statement on Gender Violence And the Prison-Industrial Complex’, Social Justice, 30 (3), 141-150.
• El-Tayeb, Fatima; Thompson, Vanessa Eileen, 2019: ‘Alltagsrassismus, staatliche Gewalt und koloniale Tradition. Ein Gespräch über Racial Profiling und intersektionale Widerstände in Europa’, in Baile, Mohamed Wa et. al: Racial Profiling. Struktureller Rassismus und antirassistischer Widerstand. Bielefeld, 311-328.
• Thompson, Vanessa Eileen (2021): ‘Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional care’, Race & Class 62(3), 61-76.

Day 5 Migration and border regimes

One key site of the racist segregation of life chances across the globe is the European border. As the world’s deadliest border, the Mediterranean naturalizes the fortification of a more and more militarized dispossession of mobility. Céline Barry traces how the pan-African legacy of transnational Black feminism inscribes anti-colonial praxis within Black feminism in Germany. The border feminism practiced by Black refugee women, lesbians, non-binary, inter and trans people promotes the unfolding of the Black Mediterranean as a space of resistant solidarity.

• Barry, Céline (2021), 'Schwarzer Feminismus der Grenze. Die Refugee-Frauenbewegung und das Schwarze Mittelmeer’, Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft, (2-2021): 36-48.