A specter haunts the world of education: inclusion, difference and cosmopolitics

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the inclusion of difference in a cosmopolitical key. The argument is to show that the centrality of the epistemic view of difference operates as an immunizing strategy that neutralizes the ethical, political and pedagogical agencies opened up by the encounter of bodies that move through ungovernable cartographies. The intervention is articulated in three analytical movements. The first problematizes the anthropological and humanist configuration of modern rationality to, simultaneously, liberate the debate around the inclusion of the constrictions of the subjectivity principle and the biopolitical disjunctions of anthropological machines. Next, we propose a rapprochement between Foucauldian historical ontology and some of the speculative démarches of the so-called new materialisms that have unfolded in anthropology since the ontological turn. Finally, in the third movement we discuss, from the perspective of Amerindian “multinaturalism”, the inclusion of differences as an unusual way of making kin. In this context, we speculatively outline another horizon for thinking about the inclusion of difference with a view to putting the debate on human formation back into question, beyond the identity regime for the constitution of subjectivities.