On scholars and students

“For me thinking is rethinking an old word” (Peter Handke). In the European student protests against Bologna one of the mottos was “We are students, not human capital” – as if young people sought to invoke this old word to resist the university’s subordination to the new economic and bio-political forms of cognitive capitalism, which makes learning (and learning to learn) its main productive force. And perhaps the definition of professors as scholars and as initiators to study (and not as producers or transmitters of useful and commodifiable knowledge) can contribute to combating their progressive precariousness and exploitation.

In this sense, the aim of this seminar is none other than to explore together the power of a disused word to see if it can be of any help both in critiquing the educational institutions of the present and in inventing and sustaining other ways of relating to speech, knowledge and thought so that school can once again be the house of study.