Copyright Stephan Polzer
Benedikt Wawra studied philosophy, ethics, and mathematics at the University of Vienna. He completed his master’s degree with a thesis on the sources of unconditional ethical claims in Kant and Levinas, and his Magister degree with a critical examination of the concept of “Bildung” in Hegel and Foucault. From 2021 to 2026, he worked as a teacher of mathematics and ethics. His research interests include the intersection of philosophy of language and ethics, philosophy of education, philosophy of time, theories of alterity, and processes of mourning.
In the ‘Theatre of Open Problems’: Atelic Learning and Teaching as Untimely Encounter
Teaching shapes the times and spaces of learning, opening up certain processes of learning while foreclosing others. Where it organizes learning around target states, standardized competences, and deadlines, or justifies school as “preparation for the real world” (Hegel), it remains inattentive to a learning that occurs in unprepared encounters and escapes criteria fixed in advance. The project calls such learning atelic – a learning whose movement is not directed toward an end set in advance, but unfolds as an ‘adventure of the involuntary’ (Deleuze) – and asks what temporality belongs to it.
Its starting point is teaching practices that borrow from the performing arts. Several thinkers offer points of departure. Walter Benjamin conceives of the proletarian children’s theatre of Asja Lācis as a space in which the world appears malleable and unfinished. Gilles Deleuze describes his lectures as Sprechgesang, connecting heterogeneous listeners through voice and affect in open variation rather than through conformity to a figure who knows and examines. Jacques Derrida, in his teaching practice, performatively questions teaching as the reproduction of a continuous inheritance. Read against their philosophies of time, these scenes help articulate a temporality of learning that resists the dogmas and the inherent conformism of pedagogical time: reproduction, assessment, and preparation.
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