Judith Butler and the public dimension of the body

A new perspective on critical pedagogyJoris Vlieghe

(Centre for Philosophy of Education, Catholic University Leuven, Vesaliusstraat 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium - joris.vlieghe@ped.kuleuven.be)

This paper is concerned with the question whether education still can have a critical voice today. One of the central aims of the traditional conception of education consisted in raising (young) people to become reflective individuals who are willing to distance themselves to the existing societal and political order. As we will show shortly this ambition has lost a lot of its credibility. There are good reasons to doubt whether this goal is still achievable, first of all because the traditional means to enhance a critical attitude within pupils, stimulating their self-reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. Therefore, to work ourselves free from this deadlock, we should conceive of another form of “critical attitude”.

In this paper I would like to discuss some arguments Judith Butler offers in her most recent writings in connection with the possibilities of such a critique (Butler, 2004a, 2004b, 2005). This is because I believe that Butler’s notion of “the public dimension of the body” (Butler, 2004a, p.26) and her analysis of human vulnerability grant a new way of thinking about the public dimension of education: here critique no longer refers to the traditional conception, but offers the possibility of a viable alternative. So I hope to show that the recent oeuvre of Judith Butler might present a more than welcome and very much original position within critical pedagogy.

I will first go deeper into the problem why precisely the possibility of critique is a problem for us today. Secondly I will propose another way of thinking about critique and try to show how Butler’s views on embodiment might help to elucidate this alternative. Then I will discuss an ambiguity within Butler’s own work and defend that she proposes in her latest work a

conception of the anonymity of the flesh, which is not in line with some of her previous thoughts, but which opens nevertheless a new perspective on the critical dimension of education. I will close this paper with some remarks on the originality of this Butlerian position within the field of philosophy of education in general and critical pedagogy in particular.

Why is the critical dimension of education a problem today?The issue I would like to deal with starting from a Butlerian

perspective concerns the question whether it is still possible for education to take a critical distance to the current social and political order. This problem is of a crucial importance for a major western tradition, within education, which has put forward as its central aim the education of (young) people to become critical and enlightened citizens (Biesta, 2006, p.2-4, Masschelein, 2004).

The classic ideal of Bildung (edification, cultivation) came down to the idea that the main objective of education is the critical inquiry of the existing social order (Masschelein, 2004). Students were expected to become initiated in a cultural heritage and to acquire the competencies needed to become bearers of social and political progress. The gebildeter Mensch (“educated (wo)men”) referred to the autonomous citizen, who develops her internal potentialities as far as possible, so that she is willing to take the responsibility for the optimazation of society, for the continual strive for a better, more equal and harmonious community. This devotion to an ideal society ascribed a prominent critical role to the gebildeter Mensch: she, more than anyone else, was expected to assume a critical position. This critical position implied a transformation of the person.

This point of view is today no longer tenable. This insight is very well captured by Theodor Adorno, one of the philosophers who had a major influence on Butler’s thought, when he states that in the modern world Bildung has become Halbbildung. Christiane Thompson comments on this idea as follows: “the experience of Bildung or learning does not predominantly change the students and their points of view anymore. Rather, the prospective experiences are intended to enhance the students’

spectrum of assets. […] Bildung has been transformed into a measure of the individual’s capacity for adaptation. […] What is learned is ‘no longer significant for one’s own life but forms a knowledge that is helpful for our survival.” (Thompson, 2006, p.73-74) So, in our “exposure” to the world, there is no room for a real transformation of ourselves. We are no longer changed by the educational process and therefore the traditional ideal of Bildung has collapsed. The only thing that happens to us is that our position gets confirmed and strengthened. We are never out of position, we are never confronted with a moment of exposure. This is because the idea of exposure is disqualified as a traumatic experience. So the educational process doesn’t encourage us to question ourselves and our position within current societal and political order.

Other authors point towards the same structural impossibility of criticality when they state that within our current practicing of and thinking about education we have all come to relate to ourselves as “entrepreneurs of our own lives” (Masschelein et al., 2007; Bröckling, 2007) This means that the present social and political regime is preserved by the very fact that all actors in the educational field (pupils and students, teachers and schools, etc.) are driven by the will to work continuously on their selves in order to consolidate and optimize their own position. A logical consequence hereof is that the acquirement of “critical competencies”, which seems to be the major goal of present education, only reaffirms the existing order. An “entrepreneur-of-herself” obviously benefits from the ability to reflect constantly upon her own position. She is by definition a “critical self”. The focus of this self-critique is the permanent “assessment” of one’s strengths and weaknesses in view of the ongoing “capitalisation” of one’s life. So even if it is true that nowadays the central aim of education consists in developing in pupils and students capabilities that have to do with self-reflexion and critical inquiry (instead of filling their heads with contents and erudition), these so called “critical attitudes” imply in no way distancing oneself from existing societal order.

Michel Foucault, another source of inspiration of Butler, made a similar diagnosis of our current situation and suggested we should appeal to the category of “limit-experience”, in order to work ourselves free from this deadlock (Foucault, 1984). As Butler argues in her comment on Foucault’s text What is Enlightenment?, it is only the experience to be determined by a historically situated discourse (i.e. the preconditions that make our actual thinking, speaking and acting meaningful) that might offer the possibility to become critical, to transform ourselves and current society (Butler, 2002). So, the very possibility of resistance against the existing regime refers to a dimension of experience in the most passive sense of this word: precariousness, being vulnerable, being prepared to be exposed to something that obliges us to change our lives. Limit-experience refers to an event that expropriates us from ourselves, that confronts us with our own finitude and it is precisely in this way that this experience gives us the possibility to criticize the present social conditions we find ourselves in.

Judith Butler and the non-transparency of the selfWithin this Foucaultian framework experience refers to a critical

attitude which has nothing to do with a rational or intentional determination of ourselves – and therefore with a strengthening of our own position as “entrepreneurial selves” - , but with a moment of radical passivity, viz. the possibility of experiencing something that has the force to change our lives, to move us out of position. Therefore it all comes down to an existential move, rather than to the taking of a firm position.

It’s precisely here that we can invoke the thinking of Judith Butler, who (at least partly) claims to be loyal to this Foucaultian stance. What links Butler’s most recent writings to the aforementioned discussion is her critique to a prevailing line of thought in western philosophy concerning the possibility to assume critical responsibility towards one’s own life, the life of others and the life of community.

She states that traditionally criticality rests upon the assumption “to give a full account of oneself” (Butler, 2005). This is because traditionally

“critical distance” has been defined in terms of the autonomy of a critical and rational subject that seeks for an ultimate justification for her actions. Trying to legitimate our moral obligations towards others and the community, we tend to found these in a kind of positive essence of what it means being human or belonging to a community. One can think here of the Kantian or Habermasian definition of transcendental (inter)subjectivity that serves as the starting point to legitimize a critical position towards the existing social, political or educational order: whether we like it or not, a transcendental analysis of moral practice (Kant) or of the communicative practice (Habermas), will show that we all have to see ourselves as rational subjects who share the same human essence.

Habermas demonstrates for instance that the will to address speech to another or the will to participate in a discussion already presuppose that we are beings who are able to listen to the arguments of others and who will have to give up our own particular points-of-view when confronted with a better argument. When we stay faithful to the demands of communicative reason, we should forsake any form of violence and accept the outcome of a rational discussion. This is because violence is the blind pursue of our own particular interest, which is the result of the closing of a deeper intersubjective essence that we should recognize in ourselves. Either we choose to behave as rational and impartial beings, and then we act according to the core of humanity we all share, or we choose the path of violence, and then we suppress this universal human essence, in order to strive for the fulfilment of our personal and particular interests (Habermas 1981). This clear-cut account of what we are is a universal truth about humanity and offers a firm ground to legitimize or criticize existing society or educational policies and practices.

Regarding the recent problem of international terrorism, Habermas states that we can rationally determine what is a just attitude towards the “unenlightened” criminals who avoid rational discussion and choose the coarse path of violence (Habermas 2003). We should never give in to the blackmail of violence and persist in defending the superiority of rational discussion and dialogue. And we should without further consideration

react against those who don’t want to take the position of the impartial participant of such a dialogue. The objection that this is a typical western approach towards this problem is discredited by showing how this position of the critic is itself contradictory. In uttering her critique she in fact demonstrates that Habermas is right: she also is participating in a rational discussion which is only possible because all participants behave as people that are willing to listen to the other and to accept the opinion that shows to be the most convincing. Everyone who wants to live in full self-transparency should accept communicative rationality and unconditionally denounce violence.

So, within a Habermasian framework, one should always start from accepting a positive account of what makes us moral accountable beings, i.e. creatures that are willing to live in a social context. This account furthermore offers a firmly validated and universally accepted ground to offer a substantiated critique towards the existing societal order.

Butler argues vehemently against this kind of philosophical position. Following Adorno here, she labels this type of discourse “moral narcissism” (Butler, 2005, p. 103). This position, that seeks to found our moral obligations on the loyalty to our own essence as rational and autonomous beings, as self-transparent and sovereign law-givers of ourselves, could furthermore be considered as a good example of the “entrepreneurship-of-oneself”, I discussed above.

Butler defends another view, arguing that it is precisely the negative experience of our own radical lacking of such a ground that constitutes our moral and communal bindings. Moral agency is granted by the experience that we never reach the ground of our own origins. Being dependent upon conditions that we cannot fully control constitutes us as moral and accountable beings. Butler claims that there exists an inescapable “opacity” within ourselves, which results from our constitution as singular creatures. And precisely the experience of this lack of transparency, this consciousness of never being able to give a definitive account of oneself, turns us into responsible moral subjects (Butler, 2005, p. 36-40; Butler, 2004a, p. 20 and 48).. “I find that my very formation implicates the other

in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.” (Butler, 2004a, p. 46).

Consequently, without any reference to an anthropological essence or to a transcendental ground, it becomes possible to speak in an alternative way about moral obligations and the possibility of adopting a critical attitude. She further argues that through this “limit-experience” of our own finitude we are confronted with a world and with others that charge us with responsibility. Thus the awareness of non-transparency does not privatize us: the strangeness within us doesn’t make us prisoners of ourselves, but confronts us with a public dimension, namely that we cannot escape our relations with the other (Butler, 2004a, p. 22). It should be noted that this is not a plea for a relational ontology (our essence = our relations to the others), but on the contrary the defence of a philosophy of radical finitude. Our “essence”, if it is still possible to use this terminology, should better be described as a void. Not in the Sartrian sense of the nothingness of absolute freedom, but as the exposure to a transcendence that forces us to relate to the other in a non gratuitous way.

Vulnerability In the following I will substantiate Butler’s claims by looking closely

to three examples she gives in her essay Violence, Mourning and Politics. The important thing to see is that she links this non-transparency time and again to the public dimension of he body.

A first example she analyses is the experience of losing someone whom one was attached to. This confronts us with the brute fact that we are but who we are, thanks to our dependency upon a particular other. What singularises us has to do with the uncontrollability of our social relations. The significance of mourning, a central theme in this essay, is that we become aware of something that escapes our own meaning-giving control. “[O]ne mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.”

(Butler, 2004a, p. 21). So we may find ourselves obliged to others because of the impossibility to give a full account of who we are, because of the impossibility to be our own ground. The striking point here is that Butler connects this with corporeality: “grief contains within it the possibility of apprehending the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (Butler, 2004b, p. 22, italics supplied).

A second example she attends to concerns the passionate resistance one may experience belonging to a political marginalised minority. In this case one can be outside oneself with anger and indignation. Butler argues against the widely accepted conviction that reduces political engagement to the desire for a society that safeguards the opportunity for every individual to be respected in her own subjective rights. This liberal and legalist vision, commonly shared by feminists and advocates of homosexual’s emancipation movements, misses according to Butler the very point at stake. Because the longing to justice in the situation of oppressed minorities is “[a] disposition of ourselves outside ourselves [which] seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure.” (Butler, 2004a, p. 25). Therefore the public sense of resistance against the existing social order is not founded in a rationalist or individualistic morality, but refers to the experience of human vulnerability. This susceptibility is further described as an exposition that has to do with our bodily incarnation, with the “precariousness of life”. Or as she states is: “the body has its invariably public dimension” (Butler, 2004a, p. 26).

This is a most innovative insight. Butler departs from the traditional (Arendtian) definition of the “public” realm as a space of visibility, which grants autonomy to every citizen and the possibility to defend her own rights. This commonly shared vision “fails to do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, and implicate us in lives that are not our own, sometimes fatally, irreversibly.” (Butler, 2004b, p. 20) This alternative conception of

“political community [which] is wrought from such ties” (ibidem) refers to human embodiment: “to be a body is to be given over to others” (ibidem). The corporeal vulnerability one experiences constitutes the public and “opens up a different conception of politics” (Butler, 2004b, p. 21).

A third example Butler uses to elucidate her position concerns again the reaction towards the treat of international terrorism and the “war on terror”. She argues that the violent reaction of the Bush-administration on the attacks of 9/11 is a very questionable answer to the experience of physical vulnerability which was explicitly disclosed when the whole world witnessed the powerlessness of a modern nation attacked by suicide commandos. Instead of deploying military activities the American people should better acknowledge the undeniable exposure to violence, the fragility of their own embodied existence so to speak. “As material embodied creatures we are exposed to the touching, the gaze and the violence of others “(Butler, 2004a, p.26). This awareness, this experience of expropriation-of-the-self could offer a possibility to formulate a non-violent response to the problem of terrorism. Considering our physical interdependency and the ever present menace of injury and death we might change our international policy: “remaining exposed to [the] unbearability [of grief] and not endeavouring to seek a resolution for grief through violence” (Butler, 2004a, p.30). As such we might engage ourselves to “[a] collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another” (Ibidem).

These three examples illustrate how an appeal to a certain kind of experience – an experience of radical passivity, of exposure, of expropriation of the self - might offer a way to think differently about the obligation to take up moral and social responsibility: this experience “establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and a sense of disorientation of the first person” (Butler, 2004b, p.25). This kind of experience of finitude furthermore grants the possibility to think of an alternative conception of critique vis-à-vis the given societal order. It speaks for itself that this experience of expropriation has nothing to do with the reaffirmation of a firm subjective position. Nor does this appeal

function as a metaphysical, anthropological or transcendental ground that lays the groundwork for a universally validated critique.

Corporeality as anonymity of the fleshThe question remains however why this experience of exposure

should refer to a corporeal type of vulnerability. Butler states time and again that I am never fully myself, as far as my body is never my own body. I think there is no straightforward answer to this question, as Butler is never quite clear about this issue and sometimes makes, to my view, incompatible statements about human embodiment. I will illustrate this by a “shift” I detect within Butler’s own thinking o this subject.

(1) In her important study The Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997a) Butler develops a rather odd conception of corporeality. As she points out in the introduction, one of her aims consists in explaining why we become “passionate attached” to the subjectivities power regime prescribes us. In this work she extends her point of view by giving an anthropological explanation of this willingness to accept pre-ordered identities in terms of our body’s fundamental tendency towards survival.

To understand this, one should remind that all subjectivity is the effect of some discourse. We are but who we are thanks to the identities ascribed to us (and spontaneously “accepted” by us) according to a given order of meanings. Power “subjectivates” in the double sense of this word: (1) we become singularized beings (2) by relating to ourselves in terms that are dominant within a given regime of truth. This is the manner in which Butler actualises Foucault’s thesis that subjectivity can be analysed as the result of a double bind between totalising and in individualising forms of power (Foucault, 1984): we gain our identity in subjection (in the sense of submission).

Now the shortcoming of Foucault’s analysis is that he cannot explain according to which psychological mechanisms subjects become willing to accept certain culturally determined identities. Therefore one should, so is the central claim of Butler in this book, understand that a power-regime makes use of our desire to exist as somebody. “No subject emerges

without a passionate attachment to those on whom he or she is fundamentally dependent […]. Moreover, the desire to survive, “to be”, is a pervasively exploitable desire” (Butler, 1997a, p.7). Referring to the crucial passage in Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral that man prefers to will nothing, to not to will at all, she states: “I would rather exist in subordination than not exist” (Ibidem). Subjectivization in the sense of being subjected is “the subject’s continuing condition of possibility” (Op. Cit., p.8).

I only exist as the result of social and cultural conditions that I didn’t invent myself: “to persist in one’s own being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own. […] Only by persisting in alterity does one persist in one’s “own” being. Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms, and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality.” (Butler, 1997, p.28). So, the conatus essendi (Spinoza), the instinct to persist in my own being, my fear to die, makes it intelligible why I am attached to my own subjection. Being this singular mortal body, unnegotiatable attached to my survival, I am exposed to the violence of a public.

This view on embodiment which put a major stress on “biological vulnerability” and exploitability is not without problems. I mention shortly two inconsistencies: first, it will be obvious that Butler here is a proponent of the classical philosophical scheme she rejects, viz.: searching for a solid ground to legitimate morality and critique. The concept of conatus essendi might be described as a fixed, universal anthropological foundation. It offers us normative and well-founded reasons to accept or, for that matter, to resist to the social and political order.

Second, one could wonder if this position is not a typical case of what Foucault calls bio-politics: this term refers to the modern regime of power that owns its effectiveness to the interest for our own survival (Foucault, 1976). Therefore the assumption that we are all fundamentally obsessed with persevering our own being can itself be analysed as the effect of a (typical modern) power regime. We are asked to relate to

ourselves as “spinozistic” subjectivities. But there is no necessity in this anthropological self-definition and it is precisely the experience hereof that could open a critical distance. So perhaps - in view of our will to survive being an effect of a particular kind of power - we should just refuse to be obsessed with self-perseverance (as a normative criterion, that is).

(2) Now, in her most recent oeuvre, I think Butler offers another conception of corporeality which avoids these two critiques and which might at the same time explain the relation between vulnerability, embodiment and the possibility of an alternative critical attitude. This line of thought is explicitly formulated in her 2002 Adorno Lectures (Butler, 2003), which were reworked in the book Giving an Account of Onself (Butler, 2005). Here she develops her intuitions in confrontation with the work of Jean Laplanche and Emmanuel Levinas.

Central to Laplanche’s psychoanalytical elucidation of the human condition is the consideration that we are all born as radical fragile creatures who are from the very beginning of our lives handed over to the care of others (Butler, 2005, p. 70). Embodiment is a condition of inescapable vulnerability. There is an undeniable frailty of our body that pre-exists our coming in the world as self-consciousness and self-reflective beings. It is the awareness hereof that constitutes an experience of radical passivity, an inescapable sense of expropriation. This experience also has a public dimension: we have to acknowledge our own incompleteness and our dependency upon others.

Butler then tries to elucidate this experience of desubjectivization, which discloses the “invariable public dimension of the body”, through a reflection on Levinas’s concept of corporeality. She introduces her reflections with a powerful quote by Blanchot, viz.: “Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word – why? But why not? – one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without a subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body” (cited in Butler, 2005, p. 84)

To experience that I never fully am/own my own body (and that I therefore am/own therefore never fully myself) plays indeed a major role

in Levinas’s thought. Within his perspective the starting point for morality has to do with the vulnerability of the flesh. Before it’s possible for me to choose intentionally to answer or not to answer the appeal the other addressed to me, I must already be touched by that other in a way that escapes all subjective control. This dimension of passivity, which predates all intentional initiative of and which constitutes us as accountable subjects, is time and again described by Levinas in corporeal terms, e.g.: “l’autre dans notre propre peau” (the other beneath our own skin), “une sensibilité immédiate” (an unmediated sensibility), “la plus matérielle des matérialités” (the most material of materiality), (Ponzio, 2004). Moral sensitivity is something which is given in the experience of being the inhabitant of a body to which we can never relate in a fully transparent way. There is strangeness and, as is stated in the quote of Blanchot, a sense of anonymity, inherent to our corporeal condition, which desubjectivizes us and which grants the possibility to think anew the public realm.

Now it is essential to link this “anonymity of the flesh” to vulnerability, so Butler argues. This is stated unambiguously in this comment on Levinas: “Violence […] delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that non of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hand, at each other’s mercy” (GOA 101). As a consequence of our corporeal nature, we are exposed to each other. This is explicitly revealed in the inescapable possibility to be hurt by other people – an experience which might be very relevant nowadays, in the age of the continuous threat of terrorism.

It should be clear then that it doesn’t make sense to invoke a private realm of transparent subjectivity as a starting point for thinking about moral responsibility, communal ties or criticality. We, as fragile corporeal creatures, should admit that there is a “community of those who have nothing in common” (Lingis, 1994), except the undeniable fact that we are exposed to each other, and that we therefore share the burden of

responsibility and of critical engagement with existing societal and political order. It is not my identity, but precisely my anonymous entanglement in “the flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty) which obliges me to assume a non-indifferent standpoint.

It is important to note here that this “anonymity of the flesh” is not of the same order of a universal, transcendental or anthropological foundation (as it is the case in Kant, Habermas or Spinoza). Or as Butler says herself: “Although I am insisting on referring to a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself, I also insists that we cannot recover the source of this vulnerability; it precedes the formation of ‘I’. This is a condition of being laid bare from the start and with which we cannot argue.” (PL 31).

The critical role of educationThis line of thinking is very relevant to the problem of the public and

critical possibilities of education and this not only for the reason that it avoids the temptation to utter a critical voice in the name of some universal and transcendental principle. After all, the uneasiness with foundational educational discourse has widely spread. The problem with the bulk of recent publications in the domain of this non-foundational critical pedagogy is that they, in my opinion, are nevertheless still seeking for a solid beacon to hold on to and therefore leave no room for a real experience of exposure.

A striking example of this is Gur-Ze’ev’s “philosophical negativism” (Gur-Ze’ev, 1998, p. 463). Making us aware of the limiting character of hegemonial pedagogical frameworks and of the immoral consequences implied by practices that pretend to have universal validity, the road should be cleared for an authentic and extra-theoretical thinking and speaking. The educator should forsake the responsibility to find for once and for ever justified principles of education, in order to recognize the limitations of his/her own perspective, so that he/she feels him/herself engaged to create openness for the value of alternative points of view. One bids a definitive farewell to the epistemological obsession (of

justification) so that education becomes a practice that nurtures itself on the moral engagement to acknowledge alterity and pluriformity. So one “refuses all versions of educational violence and as such [this approach] deserves the name counter-education. While refusing positive utopianism and violence it does not abandon the quest for transcendence and for ‘the totally different’ “(Gur-Ze’ev, 1998, p. 484).

For Gur-Ze’ev and many others the public and critical dimension of education resides in the care one assumes for the other-in-her-otherness. This radical and irrecoverable alterity nonetheless functions as an alternative to a transcendental ground, one therefore betrays to remain attached to. The willingness to respect this otherness seems to stem from the same motivation or attitude that is characteristic of foundational discourse. The commonly shared vision of criticality in the name of alterity is just another form of the belief in (or need for) transcendental principles or (negative) foundations. It is in no way a real alternative. The dedication to otherness offers a convincing reason to act in one way rather than another. Even if this isn’t a transcendental ground, it remains to be a solid ground anyway. We place ourselves in a safe position, we hope to be the right kind of person (educator) by showing the will to assume the responsibility for the fragile other who is left over to our care. So this immunizes us against the experience of exposure which is for Butler the appropriate space of criticality. This of course demands another attitude, that is, not an attitude that is concerned with foundations (or proclaiming there are no foundation), but an attitude that has to do with the willingness to go through an experience of radical dispossession.

I would like refer here again to the reflections of Christiane Thompson, I attended to in the beginning of this paper (Thompson 2005): in this era of Halbbildung we are no longer changed by the educational process, as it is only a means of strengthening our own position. Thompson furthermore uses Butler’s intuitions to depart from this educational model of the self-development of the (entrepreneurial) subject, in order to find a reactualised concept of Bildung: “[this alternative kind of] Bildung no longer forms a category of appropriation.

The boundaries that become manifest suggest rather a withdrawal of the self – the experience of the inability to determine oneself in relation to others and the world. As such, Bildung has to do with the experience of remaining strangers to ourselves. […] [B]ildung changes from a concept of identification to one of subversion” (Thompson, 2005, p. 528). It is important to stress here that subversion is not the mere opposite of identification. Subversion is not the reversal of the foundational point of view, but should rather be thought of as an attitude which opens an alternative critical space for education.

What needs to be refined further is how the public dimension of corporeality grants the possibility of an alternative form of critique, which stays deaf to the desire to find firm foundations. This appeal to vulnerability should also do more than just challenge the search for such foundations. I hope to have shown that this kind of exploration should contribute to a conception of a critical pedagogy that might offer a way to distance ourselves, as educators and students, to the existing (pedagogical) regime. We should take Blanchot’s consideration serious that such a critical move refers to an experience of “subjectivity, without a subject”, an experience of “the already dead body which no one could ever own, or even say of it, I, my body.”

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