Book review: Tyson Lewis, Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio

Abstract

Tyson Lewis has a remarkable ability to interpret complex philosophical works by developing their explicit and implicit educational concepts. Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education is no exception. In this fine book, Lewis seeks to provide an ‘educational response to the manipulativeness, coldness, and hardness’ of growing authoritarianism in education (p. 16). He is ambitious, considering the book to be part of a broader effort to liberate teaching from its oppressed state in neoliberal or, as he suggests, ‘neofascist’ society. The book offers novel approaches to two crucial educational questions: (1) What forms of education cultivate the free expression of potentialities? and (2) How might Benjamin help us challenge common, problematic binaries, for example, knowledge– truth, immanence–transcendence, and means–ends, in educational theory and practice? Often Lewis’s writing is evocative, inspiring, even poetic: ‘The wave of education swells through learning into the crash of teaching, which sends the wave outward in a million directions’ (p. 37). At times, his writing also can be seemingly abstruse, such as when he suggests that ‘Benjamin’s educational forms induce awakenings that are indeterminate swellings within what is while extending what is to its extreme point where it touches its own potentiality for transformation (its capacity to become different by touching difference)’ (p. 208). While the book addresses each of this statement’s concepts, readers less familiar with the philosophical discourse which it invokes may be challenged to parse and explicate the relationships among ‘awakening’, ‘indeterminacy’, ‘swelling’, ‘touching potentiality’, ‘transformation’, and ‘difference’. Lewis does not hesitate to use the extreme terms, ‘fascist’ and ‘neofascist’, in characterizing prevalent neoliberal practices and policies and growing right-wing sociocultural and political dispositions. Writing his book in the midst of the right-wing fanaticism being exposed and incited during the Trump presidency, Lewis alerts us to growing parallels between mid-twentieth-century European fascist ideologies and current authoritarian approaches to educational policy and practice. At times, however, Lewis appears to treat the term ‘fascism’ as similar to, or closely analogous to, other movements and socioeconomic forms such as right-wing fanaticism, liberalism, neoliberalism, and 1060211 TRE0010.1177/14778785211060211Theory and Research in EducationBook reviews book-review2021