Dialogues in delay: speculations about a whole other temporality of the pedagogical encounter

Abstract

In order to conjecture an expansive ethical-political groundwork capable of fostering an eminently critical attitude before the educational present, the text hereby presented is organized according to three interconnected argumentative plateaux. The first of them is devoted to the novel Memoirs of Hadrian and, in particular, to Marguerite Yourcenar’s reflections on the method of composition of the work and of her peculiar mode of addressing the past. Then, by means of a certain game of contrast with the writer’s viewpoint, some hallmarks of the Foucauldian theoretical legacy are brought about, especially concerning the interplay between present, history and truth. Thus, one managed to create an argumentative ambience settled on the notions of regime of truth, of genealogical history and of the ontology of the present. The final text discussions are dedicated to focusing, alongside Michel Foucault’s own experience as a teacher, on the two main topics – the care of the self and parrhesia – of the thinker’s ulterior intellectual course, bearing in mind their possible pedagogical implications. With that, one sought to cast a gaze on the pedagogical encounter that, by conferring a certain ethical-stylistic potency on it, reclaims a time regime other than the transactions which take place therein.