Introduction: Deleuze and Lifelong Learning

Abstract

This book is about lifelong learning and creativity, about which so many clichés and commonplaces exist that a challenging perspective is needed to shed any light on what everyone already seems to know. We need the (im)modesty of the fool to do this, to foolishly assert that we do not know. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s work proclaims this foolishness, and, although its contribution to learning is being increasingly examined by educators, the implications and effects of his concepts on lifelong learning are less well understood. It is perhaps because of its complexity that Deleuze’s work is still less well known to us than it deserves, despite an upsurge in interest since his death in 1995 and the new directions that his work promises. Yet Inna Semetsky, for one, has argued that an investigation of Deleuze’s “legacy” for education is “imperative” and “paramount”, largely because of its creative potential. Following Deleuze, it is pedagogy, she argues, that must educate us “in becoming able to feel, to know, and to conceive: that is to create concepts” (Semetsky, 2008a, pp. vii–viii). Deleuze and Guattari describe these concepts as bricks: material blocks of sensations which can be used in many ways, but they are perhaps best used for breaking windows, allowing us to take a look outside.