The last fifteen years have seen an increased interest in the thought of Giorgio Agamben as a new way of doing educational theory. Exemplary in this regard is the work by Tyson Lewis (2015), who developed an Agambenian account of education based on the notion of study, but also Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons’ (2013) reappraisal of the school based on the Agambenian notion of suspension and profanation. In this paper we want to turn to a recently published Agamben book, that hasn’t been discussed by philosophers of education, viz. his analysis of the Medieval literary trope of the adventure (Aventura). This short, albeit very detailed and ingenious study of the phantastic world of knights is an extraordinary and uniquely affirmative work of a philosopher concerned so far with criticizing the Western biopolitical power regime (See Kotsko 2018).

Admitting that Agamben’s reflections on the adventure consist of an affirmative ontological elucidation of (individual) human existence, we want to show that his analysis provides an extremely precise description of ‘educational existence’. What he analyzes as the adventure in its original medieval meaning allows for giving a substantial picture of what it means to be a student, i.e. what studying is about. With this, we don’t envisage to stipulate an essentialist and normative ideal all students should have to live up to ( in view of which they should be judged as good/bad students). Rather, with the help of Agamben, it is possible to sketch a rich account of what makes the life of the student  intrinsically worthwhile that (hopefully) speaks to our own educational experiences.

Now, in our reading of Agamben’s argument about the adventure  four central ideas stand out as central to our inquiry:

[1] too often the adventure is seen in negative terms: as a mere trivial diversion (a counterweight to our heavy and serious lives we could go ‘on adventure’, i.e. on a trip); as something that may happen to us from the outside, that in the end remains there and that doesn’t really concern who we are; as a merely esthetical matter of being sentimentally or ironically infatuated. Over and against this, Agamben argues, adventure is a most serious life experience that comes with a rebirth. Even if the adventurous is always momentary (being a break with the ordinary), it also transforms life as a whole and gives life consistency. 

[2] With a reference to Goethe’s  Urworte, the five forces to which each and every individual has to relate to give shape to her existence (Demon, Chance, Love, Necessity and Hope), Agamben tries to characterize what is at stake in our lives in terms of the seemingly tension between contingency (that what randomly happens without any ground) and inevitability - playing on the ambiguous sense of adventure as simultaneously meaning what happens purely by chance [par aventure] as well as destiny [sventura]. That what accidentally comes to us [ad-venire] and befalls us, needs to become an event [eventus]: not something that just happens, but something that happens to us. The existential/ethical endeavour is, then, ‘not be unworthy of what happens to us’ as Deleuze (1990, p. 149) wants it. That what makes life-as-adventure meaningful is not the discovery of a ground that was already there and that provides us with the security of leading a good life, provided that we choose for it. Rather, it is about embracing what happens to us and to build-up and constitute a life in accordance with this event (in spite of its contingency). It comes down to making manifest in our lives that this event makes all the difference.

[3] Therefore we need to tell adventurous tales. However, adventure, as a literary phenomenon, doesn’t only concern the deeds of the knight that are (accurately or not) reported on in adventurous stories. Adventure also denotes the story itself. The genre itself is called adventure. It is only while writing things up or counting the story, that the adventure first makes sense. The adventure (as a form-of-life) doesn’t pre-exist the narration of the adventure. It comes to existence while being told. It is a matter of immanent self-constitution, or as Etienne Souriau (2015) wants it, a matter of instauration. Like in the coming into being or the great work of art, the artist is as much shaped by the artwork itself, as it is the case that the artwork is the ‘product’ of the artist. One only becomes a knight through one’s adventure (meaning both life and story). [4] At the end of his book Agamben reserves a special place for hope and love. Love [eros], he says, is the ‘regenerating potency that, beyond us, gives live to the demon [our destiny]’ (p. 88): there is a dimension to life vis-à-vis which we stay passive, but it is up to us to let us be carried by it so as to start a new and meaningful life. This also means that we must find hope by abandoning a particular hope (i.e. hoping for some future state that that we intentionally strive at). Rather, we must assume hope-in-the-present as an affirmation of that what just happens to us.

We argue that this precisely defines the student’s life (as opposed to the learner or the entrepreneur). When we develop in interest in some particular thing we desire to study, this concerns a true event of falling in love. Now, with Agamben, we might analyze this event as a call for living an adventurous life in which an encounter starts to shape us (more than that we are in full control over our lives). It is about not being unworthy of what happens to us and to cultivate this encounter (as opposed to the Kierkegaardian Don Giovanni who, dissatisfied with the mere contingent nature of the events that befall him, has to look continuously for more enticing events). Being a student is, fundamentally, a life experience in which, from the inside-out, a life is self-constituted, not on the basis of a strong and willful decision about a desired future, but in sync with a love for things in the world that we encounter and that place demands on us, and in view of a radically immanent hopefulness.

Agamben, G. (2018) Adventure (L. Chiesa, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) Logic of Sense (M. Lester, Trans.). London: Bloomsbury Kotsko, A. (2018). Fun with Agamben! The Italian philosopher of gloom takes a surprising turn. https://thenewinquiry.com/fun-with-agamben/ Lewis, T. (2015) On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality. London: Routledge. Masschelein, J., Simons, M. (2013). In Defence of the School. A Public Issue. E-ducation Culture & Society Publishers: Leuven. Souriau (2015). The Different Modes of Existence (E. Beranek and T. Howles, Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.