Thinking Education Through Deconstruction. Why Deconstruction Makes Education Possible

This contribution seeks to demonstrate that the encounter between deconstruction and education represents a crucial turning point for rethinking the future of educational theory and practice. To this end, it distances itself both from readings that interpret deconstruction as a destructive gesture incompatible with education, and from those that would simply apply selected deconstructive categories to educational practice. Revisiting Gert Biesta’s interpretation, the paper shows how deconstruction enables an unforeseen sense of education to emerge, one capable of exceeding the limits of prevailing pedagogical conceptions. Starting from the observation of a growing interest in the intersection between deconstruction and education, the argument proceeds by demonstrating, first, how Gert Biesta’s educational thought foregrounds the active–passive movement characteristic of deconstruction, and subsequently, how recent developments in deconstructive thought make it possible to continue the task of rethinking education. In this way, the paper argues that deconstruction illuminates the nexus between event and educational responsibility, and allows education to be reconceived as an intentional exposure of the educator to an event that exceeds any horizon of expectation. From this perspective, it is argued that deconstruction enables us to reconceive education not within the horizon of development or the probable, but within the provocation of its invention.