Temporality, Pleasure, and the Angelic in Teaching: Toward a Pictorial-Ontological Turn in Education

In this article, we explore a new way of philosophizing and theorizing about education with the help of a detailed description and analysis of works of art. More precisely, we turn to three portrayals or figures of angels (as depicted by Albrecht Dürer, Paul Klee, and William Hogarth) in order to figure something out about what it means to be a teacher. As such, our work is in line with two recent developments, the pictorial and the ontological turn in education. At the same time, we add new insights to these approaches. The angels we discuss are also "bad" or fallen angels—and, in that sense, the dimensions of teaching we bring to the fore are characteristic of a teacher whose doings are not at all in line with current discourses on good education. This is particularly because we focus on the teacher's doings rather than starting from her relationship with students. Combining our pictorial analyses with key concepts taken form the work of Georgio Agamben (namely, nonrelational relationality, suspension, and potentiality), we portray the teacher as maintaining a particular relation toward time (interruption of teleological conception of time) and of enjoying herself in different ways (passion, affirmation).