Igor Jasinski’s research while affiliated with Montclair State University and other places

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. By utilizing the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, the authors propose a radical reconceptualization of the practice known as Philosophy for Children (P4C) that focuses on the experience of one’s potentiality to speak rather than the development of specific skills or types of speaking. 'Philosophy for Infancy' (P4I) emerges as a non-instrumental educational practice that does not dictate what to say or how to say it but rather focuses on the potentiality to say something. In the process of developing P4I, the authors address a long-standing question concerning the politics of education. Instead of education as a means to a pre-defined political end (citizenship education, for example) or education as an end in itself (divorced from political concerns), the authors argue that the non-instrumental approach to potentiality is the embodiment of an equally non-instrumental political community that is itself always in potential. P4I is intended to work within the procedural framework offered by the P4C-program and recognizes a latent potentiality in the practice that allows for a common use of language. Throughout the theoretical discussion, the authors offer practical applications and excerpts of children’s dialogue to provide anchoring points for classroom teachers.

While Agamben himself seems to think of studying primarily as a solitary activity (with little evidence for favoring communal studying, in education or otherwise), it should be noted that it was Heidegger′s seminars—an inherently communal educational setting—that led to his decision to become a philosopher.

It is customary in a monograph such as this one to provide biographical information to get to know the man or woman behind the work, in order to better understand the origin and formation of his or her ideas, and to reveal the human—and maybe all too human—side of a prominent thinker. In Agamben’s case, the problem is that we have only very little information about what is commonly considered a personal life. It is not that Agamben’s life lacks personal experiences or relationships but that those are so closely tied to his work that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between the two. As David Kishik has observed, “neither Agamben’s ‘life’ nor his ‘work’ can really make a lot of sense independently of one another, because they both operate in the zone of indetermination that we call a ‘lifework’” (2012, p. 3). That this closeness between his life and his work as a writer is not unintentional can be gleaned from his assertion that “life is only what is made in speech” (EP, p. 81). While we should not take this to mean that, for Agamben, language is all there is (in contrast to Derrida, for Agamben there is life “outside the text”), it is certainly true that he sees the use of language as an essential and constitutive feature of a human life. This also means that instead of searching for clues about his ideas in “so-called real life” (EP, p. 82), to better understand his work, we need to look at what it means to lead a life that is “made in speech.”

It has been said that “in the work of every philosopher there is a pivotal idea that when deeply understood, reveals the foundations of his or her system or nonsystem of thought” (Palmer 2007, p. 126).

In the last chapter, I took a first step toward gauging the relevance of Agamben’s concept of infancy for an idea of education that contains the possibility of a suspension of the logic of learning (education as a mere transfer of knowledge or skills, aimed at specific ends) within the law of education, and how we might think of this experience that allows for an openness to new and different ways of speaking (thinking and acting) as educationally beneficial in a general sense. But since for Agamben, the experience of possibility/infancy happened outside of traditional educational settings, involving a variety of activities such as watching movies, writing, doing philosophy, the question is what kind of more specifically educational activity could allow for a more fully realized experience in an educational context. As we have already seen, the term Agamben uses to refer to activities that allow for an experience of infancy is study.

If applying Agamben’s idea of study to formal education settings, in general, may have seemed like a stretch, the educational commons—that is, the traditional (content-area) classroom, lecture hall, or seminar room, with specific places and times for educational encounters, a particular subject-matter, and lesson plans directed at predetermined outcomes—would appear to be even less suitable and less conducive to study, from an Agambenian perspective. Instead of the spatial and temporal gaps and intervals, what is at issue here are gaps in the curriculum, that is, in the content (or subject-matter) of education. But given that the whole point of spatial and temporal gaps was to leave undetermined what may happen in them to allow for the possibility of study, the question is, how we can conceive of a studious curriculum at all?

When we think of places to study, it is typically not classrooms, lecture halls, or seminar rooms that come to mind. It may still happen there, if an instructor ends the seminar early or when the substitute teacher hasn’t received any instructions and declares the class a “study hall,” or when students use a classroom after the end of the school day. But the way we commonly think of it, studying takes place outside of and between places specifically designated for teaching and learning: in the library, the student lounge, in hallways, the cafeteria, the schoolyard, on the school bus or a commuter train, in a coffee shop, or the living room couch. And while we might think of studying primarily as a solitary activity, it is also done with or alongside others, in homework clubs or study groups. And if we broaden our use of the term even just slightly, we may include conversations with friends or family members, a librarian, the school custodian, or a store clerk. The question considered in this chapter is how the way we think of the spatial features of educational institutions can inspire study in such a broader and/or a specifically Agambenian sense—namely as an activity that is not just auxiliary to what is happening in the spaces designated for learning (cramming for a test, doing research for a term paper), but one that is—broadly speaking—done for its own sake.

The question we asked at the end of the last chapter is why the idea of education we find in Agamben’s life and work should be thought of as preferable to other forms of life. So far, the answer has been largely implicit: In the first part, we saw how Agamben’s own life—the life of a studier—could be regarded as desirable, based on how it is experienced (and articulated) by him. At the end of the second chapter, we gave a preliminary answer to the question of the significance of infancy for education—saying that a more fully developed experience of infancy would mean more openness toward new ways of speaking (thinking and acting), which could be considered valuable by itself, especially if we see education as more than the mechanical transmission of knowledge and skills. We then identified the idea of ease as one of the facets of study and characterized the in-tentional classroom community as a community based on love and friendship—with an underlying assumption that ease, love, and friendship could be considered to be, by themselves, desirable. The purpose of this chapter is to be more explicit about why—from an Agambenian perspective—we should think of the form of life exemplified by in-tentional educational communities as preferable to those aimed at the realization of common goals and objectives. Which is part of the larger question of why a society based on the idea of use rather than appropriation should be thought of as preferable to the alternatives. I begin by outlining Agamben’s strategy of arguing for the life of the studier as a happy (or happier) life (5.2). I then present Agamben’s idea of happiness as a form of living contemplation (5.3) and consider what this means for the possibility of individual (5.4) and communal (5.5) happiness in education