This essay reexamines pedagogical practice and its normative assessment in the American university system by employing an approach derived from Michel Foucault's knowledge/power nexus. While a systematically applied curriculum such as Gerald Graff's "teaching the conflicts" has the potential to democratize higher education, it may be ineffective if the social inequalities of the professor-student relationship, as presently practiced, are not addressed first. As advocates of critical pedagogy maintain, contra Graff's well-known proposal, disciplinary bio-power may continue to impede the performability of cultural critique as long as classrooms instantiate the struggle for hegemony. In foregrounding "resignification" in institutions of learning, the author reassesses how the assertion of a "care of the self," as outlined in Foucault's later work, can alter the conditions under which faculty and students learn together. Foucault's "arts of existence" enact a democratic-ethical imperative that counters "subjectification" in its capacity to sediment structures of domination. Subjectification, however, can also enable resignifications, once theories of performativity--derived here from Stuart Hall and Judith Butler--are deployed to clarify the suturing of agency with system and to reformulate the constraining normativities of an increasingly corporatized academy. (Contains 19 notes.)