Living Impotentially: An Allegorical Inquiry

Abstract

This paper challenges the reduced understanding of schools as places for students to learn the useful towards tomorrow and explores alternate languages to understand schools more educationally. It mainly appropriates Agamben’s and Lewis’ conceptualizations of impotentiality with particular attention to its relevance to and implications for education. Allegory as a curriculum concept is adopted methodologically to unpack and reactivate the fragmented, nuanced and autobiographical stories, exploring what might count as living impotentially. Through the allegorical re-searching in my own stories in relationship with others, I find that living impotentially involves overlapping and recursive moments, including yielding and suspending, wondering and wandering and dis/re/connecting, which jointly contribute to one’s becoming/unbecoming and doing/undoing. Finally, I briefly discuss Laozi’s dao and how it could speak to impotentiality in dao’s dynamic stillness. Skhole, a place originally meant for free time, yearns for a space of impotentiality, inviting each one of us to return to ourselves, to understand ourselves better as a human being.