The article offers a conversation with the ghost of the madman "Jacotot/Ranciere": one of the possible dialogues between the ignorant schoolmaster and my own perplexities in what I feel to be an endgame. Is there any point at the present time, in the declining mercantilist university, in pondering once again the issue of the place of philosophy in…

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of "reasoning" even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society…

Starting from a Foucaultian perspective, the article draws attention to current developments that neutralise democracy through the "governmentalisation of democracy" and processes of "governmental subjectivation". Here, ideas of Ranciere are introduced in order to clarify how democracy takes place through the paradoxical process of "political…

The passion of inequality exists in the discourse that binds people by their adhesion to the beliefs about the hierarchic distribution of positions in society. In this manner the differences that structure the (apparently) natural titles to be governed or to govern are put in a state of aggregation. The apparent naturalness of these titles masks a…

In several enigmatic passages, Paulo Freire describes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a "pedagogy of laughter". The inclusion of laughter alongside problem-posing dialogue might strike some as ambiguous, considering that the global exploitation of the poor is no laughing matter. And yet, laughter seems to be an important aspect of the pedagogy of…

In this paper I discuss three different ways in which we can refer to those we teach: as learner, as student or as speaker. My interest is not in any aspect of teaching but in the question whether there can be such a thing as emancipatory education. Working with ideas from Jacques Ranciere I offer the suggestion that emancipatory education can be…

The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be "out" to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means…

This essay offers an educational understanding of truth deriving from the work of Jacques Ranciere. Unlike other educational accounts--the traditional, progressive, and critical accounts--of truth that take education as a way of approaching pre-existing truths (or lack of pre-existing truths), this essay establishes an account of truth that is…

This article takes up a text that Ranciere published shortly after "The Ignorant School Master" appeared in French, "Ecole, production, egalite" ["School, Production, Equality"] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being preeminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is…

In this article I discuss the role of the immigrant in Swedish society and especially how such a role is construed through what I call the myth of schooling, that is, the normalization of an arbitrary distribution of wealth and power. I relate this myth to the idea of consensual democracy as it is expressed through an implicit idea of what it…

In this article, I turn my attention to the figure of the ignorant master, Joseph Jacotot, that is depicted in "The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation" (1991). I will show that the voice of Jacotot can actually be read as a reaction against the progressive figure of the teacher which, following Ranciere's view, can be…

This paper argues that Badiou's and Lacan's theorizations of ethics offer a way to formulate an ethics of teaching and to explore what such an ethics might look like when teachers encounter events that disrupt their quotidian lives. Relying on the work of Badiou and Lacan, the paper critiques mainstream approaches to the ethics of teaching and…

The essay distils from Badiou's writing a pedagogy based on his theories of knowledge and truth, as brought to bear on poetry and the arts. By following Badiou's implicit ontology of learning, which presupposes a dynamic and passionate engagement with a concrete situation, the essay argues that Badiou's view of modernity, in particular,…

Badiou's philosophy of the "event" has itself become an event of sorts for contemporary social and political theory. It has broken radically with a set of propositions concerning the operation of power, the status of knowledge, and the possibility of action that were for some time considered nearly unquestionable, in many ways defining what Badiou…

Almost a hundred years ago, John Dewey clarified the relationship between democracy and education. However, the enactment of a "deeply democratic" educational practice has proven elusive throughout the ensuing century, overridden by managerial approaches to schooling young people and to the standardized, technical preparation and professional…