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Judith Butler and the Public Dimension of the Body: Education, Critique and Corporeal Vulnerability
Author(s) -
VLIEGHE JORIS
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of philosophy of education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.501
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9752
pISSN - 0309-8249
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9752.2010.00746.x
Subject(s) - sociology , argument (complex analysis) , epistemology , appeal , realm , politics , vulnerability (computing) , originality , power (physics) , field (mathematics) , perspective (graphical) , environmental ethics , social science , political science , law , philosophy , mathematics , computer science , pure mathematics , qualitative research , biochemistry , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , artificial intelligence , computer security
In this paper I discuss some thoughts Judith Butler presents regarding corporeal vulnerability. This might help to elucidate the problem of whether critical education is still possible today. I first explain why precisely the possibility of critique within education is a problem for us today. This is because the traditional means of enhancing a critical attitude in pupils, stimulating their self‐reflective capacities, contributes to the continued existence and strengthening of the current societal and political regime. A way out of this deadlock is offered from within a Foucauldian perspective. Criticality here refers to an experience of exposure and expropriation of the self. This kind of limit‐experience is also of a central importance in the most recent work of Judith Butler. She links this experience to the corporeal condition of susceptibility. Our bodies have a public dimension as we are inescapably exposed to one another. The main argument of my paper has to do with whether this appeal to corporeal vulnerability might offer a new way of thinking about the public realm and about the possibility of critique, especially within the field of education. I conclude the paper by showing the originality of Butler's thought in this respect and the possibilities it opens for thinking in a radically new way about critical pedagogy.