Vincenzo Di Nicola
Chapter in: Zizek and Education,
edited by Antonio Garcia
Foreword by
Creston Davis, Afterword by Slavoj Zizek
Rotterdam,
Netherlands: Sense Publishing, "Transgressions: Cultural Studies and
Education" Series, in press.
Abstract
The author engages a group of critical
thinkers and practitioners, from Boal and Freire to Derrida, Foucault and
Agamben to Badiou, Lacan and Zizek, as steps towards a pedagogy of the event. A
central aporia or problematic of pedagogy is posed as the paradox of authority
versus novation. In much thinking and
practice, pedagogy risks the traumatic transmission of authority. This is
problematicized as authority
as trauma.
The event is proposed as an alternative to
such pedagogical trauma. The event in
thinkers as diverse as Derrida, Lacan and Zizek has already occured and we are
just repeating, substituting symptoms. This is an almost deterministic,
structural view of the event. In Foucault, the event may be imagined as
discourse, an articulation of dispositifs
or apparatuses. In Agamben, the event is even more indeterminate, located in a
zone of indifference, potentiality,
beautifully described as porosity in
Benjamin’s essay on Naples.
Badiou opens the ultimate possibility: an
ontology based on the event, including the event defined in the broadest, least
deterministic and most radically open way, giving way to novation. With this,
we can imagine a pedagogy of the event.
This is a Badiouian pedagogy. Without a theory of the event and of change,
there can neither be the genuine transmission of knowledge nor the possibility
of novation, new explorations of knowledge by bringing new things into the
world.
A pedagogy that prepares us for novation
and is open to the event which creates the possibilities of genuine subjects
who are faithful to the event is a pedagogy of truth. A pedagogy of the event
is a pedagogy of truth. Such a pedagogy will not invoke tradition as authority
and traumatically shut down possibilities but will rather open possibilities,
in what Badiou calls novation, to create a pedagogy of truth.
