The dissertation examines teaching practices that draw on the performing arts. Its point of departure is texts by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida that address forms of teaching and learning which suspend and interrupt the chronological and teleological schemes of pedagogical time. These texts are read against the background of the respective philosophies of time.

Benjamin’s text on Asja Lācis’s proletarian children’s theatre, for instance, opens up the possibility of critically engaging with the assumption that the aim of education is the ‘preparation and rehearsal for the real world’ (Hegel). Instead, it shows how children’s theatre can open up a space of education in which the child experiences the world, through an unprepared encounter, as unfinished and malleable.

Deleuze describes his own lectures as Sprechgesang. In them, heterogeneous participants connect through an open variation of voice and affect, rather than through subordination to the teacher as the one who knows and examines. They proceed from a concept of learning that is not oriented towards representable and generalisable target states and their measurement, but unfolds as an ‘adventure of the involuntary’.

In his seminar La vie la mort, Derrida demonstrates in a performative manner that an understanding of teaching as the mere reproduction of a continuous inheritance and the fulfilment of a predetermined programme reduces aspects such as pleasure, selectivity, and death to manageable moments of transmission. Through his readings of Jacob, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, he shows how each act of reading and transmission reveals the uncontrollable differences of a text, which are always already inscribed in the very process of reproduction. He captures this uncontrollably doubling dynamic in an image from the theatre, namely the double devil that Rousseau recounts in his Letter to d’Alembert.