203 Harvard Educational Review Vol. 80 No. 2 Summer 2010 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Rethinking Education and Emancipation: Being, Teaching, and Power NOAH DE LISSOVOY University of Texas at Austin This essay describes two central principles for a renewed emancipatory pedagogy across educational contexts: the recognition of an essential equality between students and teachers and a liberatory agency that uncovers and builds on students’ effectivity as beings against domination. While critical educational theory traditionally conceives of the human as a condition to be developed through the process of conscientization, De Lissovoy argues for the recognition of the human as the already existing fact of a body in struggle. He proposes an understanding of the human as the ontological ker- nel of the selves of students and teachers, as it asserts itself before contests over knowl- edge and identification. Building from recent work in cultural studies and philoso- phy that confronts the question of being as a political problem, the author develops an original understanding of emancipation as the discovery and affirmation of the persistent integrity and survival of beings in struggle. In an inhuman world, the problem of education is the problem of articulating a human voice against the machineries of violence visited persistently upon persons—a voice against the truth of power, the dead and finished truth of what is decided, the truth of the inert and incontrovertible. The problem of education is the problem of unwinding the human body and soul from this intricate clockwork of not merely the correct and commendable but also the apparently self-evident and inevitable. It is the problem of rescuing being from what is, a what is that has conquered every other possibility to give itself the sta- tus of fact and truth. This what is is not just an apparatus of painful training; it is a machine of assimilation and destruction. The experiences that theorists have identified variously as exploitation, marginalization, and normalization should not be fought over as to their priority since they all participate in the same process. They represent the various modes of an assault on the human