Studenthood: A Lyotardian Rewriting of Liberal Arts Education

This thesis engages three modes of critique to resist contemporary neoliberal and historical ideas of liberal education as well as articulate and endeavor studenthood, the liberal art of study. The first form of critique follows the academic convention of critical argument; it criticizes present neoliberal learning as illiberal and historical iterations of liberal education as inherently pessimistic, relying on transcendent defenses. The thesis engages the work of Jean-François Lyotard on that of infancy, affect, and the differend to articulate studenthood and study as liberal education’s other: simultaneously what liberal education needs in order for it to be but also what it occludes in its projects. In the articulation of this (un)educational dimension, the thesis engages a more Kantian form of critique, contrasting studenthood ontologically, epistemically, phenomenologically, and intersubjectively against the figure of the learner and the studier in educational thought. The thesis also engages in a formal mode of critique by endeavoring the kind of studious liberal art it articulates in three Study Traces. The form of the thesis invokes the differend between studenthood and liberal education, questioning the stakes of what it is to write and assess a thesis that tries not to be a thesis.