Full Description
Contending that radical politics needs educational theory, Communist Study: Education for the Commons poses a series of educational questions pertinent to revolutionary movements: How can pedagogy bridge the gap between what is and what can be, while respecting the gap and its uncertainty and figurality? How can pedagogy accommodate ambiguity while remaining faithful to the communist project? In answering these questions, educational theorist Derek R. Ford develops a pedagogical constellation that radically opens up what education is and what it can mean for revolutionary struggle. To chart this constellation, Ford takes the reader on a journey that traverses disciplinary and ideological boundaries, innovatively reading theorists as diverse as Agamben, Marx, Lyotard, Butler, and Lenin. Demonstrating that learning is the educational logic that underpins capitalism and democracy, Ford articulates a theory of communist study as an alternative and oppositional logic. Poetic, performative, and provocative, this theory of study is oriented toward what Ford calls "the sublime feeling of being-in-common," which, as he insists, is always a commonness against.
Contents
Contents
Foreword. Toward a Communist Philosophy of Education: Reflections on Method and Methodology (Tyson E. Lewis)
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A partisan theory of study
Part one: Subject
Chapter 1: Subject formation
Chapter 2: Immaterial subjects (and the fetish thereof)
Part two: Study
Chapter 3: Studying whatever
Chapter 4: The secret struggle
Chapter 5: The terror of democracy
Chapter 6: Figure
Part three: Struggle
Chapter 7: In praise of tanks
Chapter 8: Party
Conclusion: Architectures of resistance
Afterword: It's a Wednesday: To be a problem-with, to be a problem-for (Ailish Hopper)
Bibliography
Index
About the author
