Beceasing : onto-pedagogical dis-integration
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Jon Hunsberger (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Kathryn Hytten
Abstract: This project concerns pedagogy and ontology and lies at the intersection of a deep study of two figures, two texts: Calvin Warren’s nihilism/Ontological Terror and Plato’s idealism/Republic. I notice in these works the presence of guardian—which is to say, following the Greek, phulaks—figures. The phulakes of Plato’s Republic, as the philosopher enlists them, find themselves bound to serve and protect the wall being, the boundary between what is and what is not. As such, following Warren, the work that these phulakes do is fundamentally antiblack, inasmuch as it is fundamentally anti-what-is-not. Throughout these pages, I suggest that phulakes as such linger into the contemporary era, at the very least as ‘humans,’ following Warren, and, following Plato and how he introduces them, as onto-pedagogues and onto-mythagogues. I admit this problematic tendency in my self: I am a teacher, I am a storyteller, I am a phulaks figure. And as far as I can tell, I can’t not be. Both Plato and Warren point to and through this ontological deadlock, an ontometaphysically concretized world and inescapably human way of moving in and viewing the world. Humans, pedagogues, storytellers, and phulakes do not have a choice as to whether or not they and their work reifies ontological antiblackness, only how. How am I to respond to this lock, this boundary? I set up this problem that does not have a solution and write as a practice of sitting with the tension that such a conundrum engenders. As the project proceeds, the personal emerges (this project is about ‘me’)—throughout my life, I have noticed patterns regarding how pedagogical and mythagogical figures have pointed me in relation to this antiblack wall and law of being that there is no getting beyond, for me. I wonder, then, in this world full of figures that tell me that I am, and that I become, what might it mean if I admit to my self that I am simultaneously ceasing to be?
Beceasing : onto-pedagogical dis-integration
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Created on 5/1/2024
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2024
- Keywords
- Antiblackness, Autoethnography, Narrative Studies, Ontology, Pedagogy, Plato