Abstract

This chapter engages with death by relating death to the notion of the subject at the core of educational thought. Death is shown to tell us something about the subject as learner and its assumed unity, autonomy and invulnerability. Educational thought drawing on the notion of the Enlightenment learner is not able to think its own death. Accordingly, the denial of the vulnerability of the learner, that is the possibility of its own death, haunts education and its ambition of production of self. An alternate understanding of death is put forward that is to allow for an engagement with vulnerability and a certain absence of self in education.