My research interest concerns the possibility of a public/critical role for education within the given neo-liberal regime. Currently it has become more and more convincing to think about education in terms of efficiency and productivity: it seems generally accepted to define the role of education in terms of facilitating pupils and students to become productive members of society. The main goal of education is considered to be raising (young) people to become willing to relate to themselves as investors-of-their-own-lives who, by striving to strengthen their own position, at the same time contribute to the flourishing of society as a whole. Therefore it is essential that students acquire “critical competencies”, in order to reflect upon their own position. So criticality becomes a means to sustain the existing educational, societal and political order and, in a sense, criticality risks to become an impossibility. A way out of this deadlock might be offered by a line of thought, which was first developed by Michel Foucault and which is elaborated in the most recent oeuvre of Judith Butler: thinking of critique as an attitude which relates to the having of a “limit-experience”. In her latest writings Butler reminds us of an “inescapable human condition” of corporeal vulnerability (especially in Precarious Life & Giving an Account of Oneself), which grants the possibility of an alternative form of ethical responsibility, community and criticality. It concerns a will to take up critical distance to existing order and a will to engage oneself for the future (of society), which is no longer founded in a conception of an accountable, rational, self-enclosed subjectivity (as this is the case under neo-liberal regime). Furthermore Butler relates this to human embodiment: “the body has its invariable public dimension”. As fragile bodily creatures who are delivered to the care of others and are exposed to their violence we are never fully ourselves. When we have an experience of this (rather than having knowledge of this condition), we are exposed to others and to a world we cannot disregard. In a sense this is a classical pedagogical event: the confrontation with something that has the force to change our lives. So this “limit-experience” doesn’t privatize us, but grants a new of thinking about the public. This concerns a conception of the public sphere which is rather unusual, as the public is mostly thought of (1) as the sharing of a common language or of a set of the same values and practices (a classical sociological view) or (2) as the entrance into a sphere of visibility (Arendt). Butler on the other hand seems to conceptualize the public as a “community of those who have nothing in common” (Lingis). In my view, two themes remain to be elaborated further: (1) how should we think of human corporeality so that this new form of the public is possible? And (2) what is the relevance for the possibility of critical education?

In order to answer the first question I will explore concepts offered by other authors who might elucidate this public dimension of the body (e.g. Merleau-Ponty: flesh of the world; Blanchot: anonymous subjectivity; Deleuze: body without organs) For the second question I will deal with the problem of corporeality (of teachers) in classrooms (which is a more and more elusive aspect of schooling as, under neo-liberal regime, the accent shifts from traditional education towards the facilitating of a self-governing learning process) as well as with the practice of physical education (which is more and more considered to be a vehicle for high-esteemed societal values such as fair-play, competition, responsibility, hygiene, leadership etc., so that one becomes immunised for the corporeal dimension of exposure).