Conference Agenda

How can bildung—conceived as a temporally structured process grounded in not knowing, not acting, and narrativity—provide a pedagogical response to contemporary conditions of acceleration and paralysis, and in doing so foster transformation and autonomy across diverse learning contexts?

The theoretical framework draws on philosophical and pedagogical traditions of bildung that have shaped European educational thought while also resonating with global debates on autonomy, temporality, and learning.

This article argues that learning is rooted in bildung, whose key conditions, not knowing, not acting, and narrativity, each introduce distinct temporal rhythms that create the pauses and openings through which genuine transformation becomes possible. Philosophically, bildung names a slow, inward process of self‑formation grounded in contemplation and openness. In a world marked by the simultaneous pressures of acceleration and the immobilizing effects of paralysis, bildung offers a third temporal mode: suspension, the temporal depth through which autonomy can develop. Pedagogically, bildung requires stepping out of familiar contexts and entering uncertain territory, a suspension between what is known and what is not yet understood. Narrativity’s timeliness lies in its capacity to create a reflective temporal space in which past, present, and future can be re‑interpreted and re‑oriented. Because our lives are shaped by unchosen fictions, bildung calls for reorientation, specifically, the intentional crafting of richer, chosen narratives that interrupt habitual assumptions and prepare us for change. The article concludes that openness to not knowing and not acting, experienced within a time shaped by both acceleration and paralysis, must be complemented by a fictional temporality that activates the specifically pedagogical time of learning as bildung.

This paper explores the paradox at the heart of Simone Weil’s notion of decreation—the act of ‘undoing the creature in us,’ emptying the self so that God may dwell in the void it leaves—and how such unmaking becomes the ground for genuine creation. In an age of the hyperactive ego, pressured to ceaselessly create self-production and addicted to hyperattention to stimuli, no void remains for decreation. Drawing on Anne Carson’s reading of Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Weil, this paper traces the tension between decreation and a writer’s desire to create. For Weil, only desire—not will—makes real attention possible; creation is not striven for but given to the waiting void of decreation. The paper analyses the paradox of desire: though human longing naturally falls, like gravity, toward the temporal and selfish, only desire directed toward a pure object or prayer allows escape from the prison of the self. Finally, the paper proposes an Education through Decreation. Creations formed on the basis of pure desire, decreation, and the absolute attention that pierces the void of the emptying self awaken individuals trapped within their own shells; with pure attention they encounter such works, thus experiencing decreation and, further, giving birth to yet another Creation. This chain-like decreation becomes education in itself, like a drop of Light, against gravity, spreading across the whole world.