Corrosive Subjectifications: Theorizing Radical Politics of Art Education in the Intersection of Jacques Ranciere and Giorgio Agamben

This dissertation is a philosophical inquiry on the possibilities and limitations for radical political theorization in art education. By conducting an analytical reading of passages of the existing art education research that concerns the social and political role of art education in the United States, I construct a critique of the current strategies of politicization and propose an ontological shift in a political imagination; a shift that denotes a radicalization of political theory.;My theoretical framework is rooted in Jacques Ranciere's and Giorgio Agamben's political philosophies, especially in their critiques of the constitution of a political subjectivity qua subjectification. I conceptualize the theoretical difference between these two thinkers in terms of a radical politics of actualization (Ranciere) and a radical politics of potentiality (Agamben); two strategies of radicalization that point to the intricacies of the relationship between potentiality and actuality in the process of subjectification.;The central thesis of this study is that seeing subjectification through art education merely as a process of an actualization of identities and subject positions, art educators construct a linear passage between a human potentiality and its politicized actuality, which makes political theorization highly predetermined, reduces art education itself into an empty threshold between a past and a future, and makes the humanness of human life dependent on art educators' pedagogical control. Ranciere and Agamben offer tools to disrupt such linearity by rejecting all forms of predetermination, thus opening learning and political action to their potentialities beyond teleological thought.