Profaning the University Apparatus: A Plea for Study Groups

This chapter develops Italian critical theorist Giorgio Agamben’s scattered notes on the university by articulating them with his notion of an institutional apparatus. The author argues that the university is currently an apparatus expressing the extreme tendencies of capitalism through the dominant logic of learning. Yet all is not lost. Within the university there remains a weak power that can suspend learning just enough to return the university to its potentiality. The study group is one such subaltern educational practice. Its redemptive powers come from its unique location (the university’s undercommons), its activity (appropriating the infrastructure of the university), and subjectivity of the studier (caught between being tired and being exhausted). The article closes with a short protocol for how to start up a study group of one’s own.