Teaching solitude: Professor Foucault’s “wild methods”

Abstract

This essay resumes Foucault’s understanding of teaching, as well as its influence on the work methodologies adopted by the French thinker in his classes. For this purpose, we shall analyze some of his interventions in the Collège de France courses, especially moments in which he expressed discomfort with certain institutional rites that prevented an effective dialogue with his audience, as well as brief comments on the teaching profession in interviews given in the 1970s and 1980s, in which Foucault not only exposed his discontent with the French conception of education but also outlined what he believed to be the role of a professor. If Foucault believed the professor should disrupt of our ways of thinking and acting, reappraise these writings would enable us to apprehend how this understanding modulated his own teaching performance. A performance marked by the adoption of “wild methods,” that is, small changes in the course structuring aimed at producing a qualitatively different time-a problematization time. A time turned against the present time and in favor of a future; a time whose reward is solely and exclusively solitude and silence