Judith Butler's pedagogy of grief

Abstract

This study aims to explore the possibility of an alternative pedagogy not based on modern subjectivity, using Judith Butler's theory of mourning. The meritocratic subject promoted by current education cannot respond with mourning to the death of others, which awakens the precariousness and pain of life, thus maintaining an optimism about oneself and the future. According to Judith Butler, subjects who mourn the death of others, unlike modern autonomous subjects, are vulnerable and heteronomous, emerging in such a way that the exclusive boundary with others is broken. Their mourning is a coexistence with vulnerable others, which serves as a basis for the research. On this basis, an alternative pedagogy is proposed. The pedagogy of mourning is based on the vulnerability rather than the autonomy or independence of the subject, uses critique as a tool to discover lives that cannot be mourned and creates an inclusive common politics, and mourning the death of another is constantly performed because of the ethics of failure, which can never be completed. The pedagogy of mourning is an education that restores the collapsed and exhausted subjects of modern society, reviving the value of alienated emotions such as sadness, grief and fear, and is ultimately part of the democratic education that seeks to "live together".