Language Learning and the Constitution of the Subject: Freire and Lyotard on Agency, Dialogue, and Silence

I begin with a personal confession: While reading Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” for the first time many years ago, I felt constant unease. This was, so I believe now, because of my then recent discovery of what is called “postmodern” philosophy. This text is the result of my attempts of putting this feeling of unease into words, of naming it, as for Freire precisely “naming the world” is the “fundamental precondition” for any “true humanization”.