Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Filosofía / Marzo 2021

Responding to growing efforts to bring philosophy into K-12 schools in the U.S., this dissertation takes up pedagogical and political concepts used by Jacques Rancière in order to reflect on the motivating principles and limitations of bringing philosophy to schools. Rancière critiques schooling as a mechanism by which socio-economic inequality is justified and argues that academic philosophy, following the rationalist tradition attributed to Plato, is in fact complicit in this justificatory process. Given his staunch position, it might seem that it is impossible to implement philosophy in schools using Rancièrian principles. I argue that there is a practice of philosophy in schools to which Rancière may be sympathetic on a theoretical level. In order to support my position, the principle aim of this work is to provide evidence that Rancière’s works reflect specific critiques and alternative values of both schooling and philosophy that are also represented in the principled pedagogical practice of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI). I begin to think through the possibility of CPI in new and existing schools, as well the way that the notion of possibility itself figures into this line of inquiry. My thesis is that CPI is the philosophical practice most appropriate for schools given the critiques and alternative values of schooling and philosophy shared by Rancière and CPI, but that Rancière may help to inform the way the practice is implemented.

This dissertation, All Things Commune: The Communal Imaginary in Twenty-First-Century French Fiction & Poetry, is animated by two fundamental questions: How can life be led differently, together? And, what is French literature’s radical political potential? Over the course of this project, I argue that twenty-first-century French literature is a site of radical political imagination, and, in certain cases, a veritable form of radical political practice. Through close readings of works by a diverse set of authors – including Jean Rouaud, Yannick Haenel, Virginie Despentes, and Jean-Marie Gleize – I reveal a countercurrent of twenty-first-century French literature bound up in a radical politics that is invested in imagining alternative forms of community that are autonomous from the French state, capitalism, governance, and traditional political structures. I read these literary works in light of theories of community developed by collectives such as Tiqqun and Le Comité invisible and critical theorists like Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière. All Things Commune demonstrates how reading these authors and theorists together reveals a shared imaginary of alternative communal life and radical Leftist politics, which I place under the rubric of destituent power. All Things Commune insists on the profound continuities between contemporary French literature, history, and politics. Overall, this project questions the narrow political frameworks through which twenty-first-century French literature continues to be read and demonstrates how radical politics appear in unexpected ways in a period of literature sometimes reduced to the reactionary or the apolitical.