| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores profound assumptions that are at work in Jacques Rancière’s philosophy, and asks how we may think about education in line with this philosophy. Rancière seems to be established as a “go-to philosopher” for questions concerning politics and aesthetics in relation to education, and his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987/1991) appears to have been received with a notable interest within the philosophy of education. This thesis explores ideas that seem constitutive of Rancière’s thinking. Such ideas would also be constitutive of a notion of education, if we were to think about education along the lines of Rancière’s philosophy. This is relevant if we want to refer to his concepts within educational theory and philosophy, as many scholars seem to do. My ambition, thus, is to go beyond a mere “use” of Rancière’s ideas, and to grapple with the foundations of his thinking. The question is then how—and whether at all—we may think about education Rancière’s framework of thought. I perform a close hermeneutic reading of two texts by Rancière: Firstly, “A Child Kills Himself” from the book Short Voyages to the Land of the People (1998/2003), where Rancière interprets and comments on Roberto Rossellini’s film Europe ’51 from 1952. Secondly, “Althusser, Don Quixote and the Stage of the Text” from the book The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing (1998/2004), where Rancière questions the ideas underpinning the Marxist theoretical endeavour of Louis Althusser. Through a hermeneutic interpretation, I encircle a set of motifs that figure in the texts and show how these seem to draw into play a questioning of the dynamics bet knowledge, community and truth. His use of ‘madness’ as a compliment seems to invoke a rejection of rationality and scientism. The notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘solitude’ seem to describe the fundamental condition of subjectivity when there are no extra-subjective reference points for meaning. This lack of objective knowledge or shared meaning opens up for what Rancière seems to refer as ‘void’ and ‘nothing.’ This, and the observation that Rancière’s reflections about the method of his philosophy seems to be profoundly interlinked with the ‘content’ of his philosophy, leads me to argue that Rancière’s philosophy indeed demonstrates a certain ontological position. Method and topic are interlinked because Rancière’s ontology changes the premises for how reflecting and writing—but also education—is understood. This ontology conceives of no reference point for objective knowledge, nothing at all external to the subjective experience of the world. I show how Plato, for instance, operates with an ontology of truth, so that knowledge is what resembles truth. Althusser, however, seems to operate with an ontology of the community of knowledge. This is a structuralist understanding in which knowledge constitutes community and community constitutes knowledge. Rancière’s philosophy amounts to an ontological position because the ultimate ground for knowledge seems to be the individual subject’s interpretations of the world. The notion of external reality in Rancière’s philosophy is a sensible reality, i.e. the reality as it is sensed and made sense of by a subject. Therefore, the subject–sensible relation becomes the constitutive element in Rancière’s ontology. The subjective interpretation of the world becomes the foundation rather than a notion of truth or a community of knowledge. The lack of external reference points shows that subjects are, in a sense, foreigners. However, it also grants an equal validity to all subjects’ meaning-making interactions with the sensible, because there is nothing to measure inequality against. This ontological shift seems to render obsolete the traditional notion of ‘knowledge’ as something we may have or not have. It also seems to erases the foundations for talking about education in the way we traditionally do. I here make reference to the German-Continental notion of Bildung. Rancièrian ontology seems not only to reject Bildung’s underlying narrative of acquisition of culture/knowledge. More profoundly, Rancière rejects the idea that education can be seen as education to humanity. The tradition of Bildung explicitly expresses that becoming truly human is linked to the acquisition of culture/knowledge. I then show that this fundamental narrative of education to humanity is rife also outside the Bildung tradition, with for instance the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, who criticised the concept of Bildung, and by R.S. Peters, who worked within an analytical tradition. The common theme seems to be the same that Kant stated in his lectures about education: We are born like animals and become humans through education’s de-barbarisation and cultivation of reason. Following Rancière’s ontology, however, the intelligence that makes us human is already present from nature’ side. The very idea of education to humanity makes no longer sense. There is no humanity to acquire, only a humanity to practice. Education, moreover, cannot be understood in terms of a means or a procedure, since there is no knowledge to transmit. Even meaning that is constructed through social interaction ultimately stems from an individual subject’s meaning-making. The educational moment, thus, is not the moment when knowledge is transmitted, but the moment of reflection and meaning-making. What we may call education according to Rancière’s philosophy, i.e. meaning-making, is in no way confined to situations that we usually call educational, but is indeed the mark of subjectivity and subjective existence in general. | eng |