Education, Mastery and the Marquis de Sade

Nihilism is not escaped by decree. Its subjective frameworks remain with us. To those educators who remain wedded, despite everything, to the idea of mastery – and this represents most of us – it is worth considering how an exit might look, one that operates through, rather than in spite of, the promise of mastery. This would be an exercise in Sade’s Reason, as Maurice Blanchot would have it. This would be an attempt to practice mastery without enslavement, passing through enslavement to its opposite. So let us imagine education as mastery, as its fulfilment, and see how that might look.