Not in the Name Of: Time and Disappearances in Ethics of Art Education

This chapter approaches the relationship between art, ethics, and education through a trope of disappearance. I explore how ethics of art education could be understood to disappear from – not simply confront – normative and metaphysical frameworks, and what do such disappearances mean in terms of temporality of ethics. I conduct a critical reading of the Greek term “aphesis” as it has been utilized by art educators jan jagodzinski and Dennis Atkinson to describe a releasement from representational logic and metaphysics of the individual. I claim that their utilization of aphesis functions like Pauline faith: it delineates the present as intermediate, stagnant time, and turns its profound contingency into a motor of historical progression of time. To offer an alternative approach to disappearance, I turn to Maurice Blanchot, whose nocturnal ethics and aesthetics of writing help to resist the future-leaning narratives of art education.