Taking the position of a constant critic is key to test the boundaries of society.

Learning, in this respect, represents a form of (bio)power, the organisation of a studious life’s force or potentiality, through its pseudo-instrumental inscrip-tion into the social function of ‘lifelong learning’. The latter is thus to be firmly distinguished from study as a ‘permanent condition’ in which, according to Agamben, the desire for knowledge is so intense to become a ‘form of life’.35While the student (permanently) questions the functional logic of instrumen-tality which commands (also permanently) the learner’s self-production and, therefore, has always already found what they need in, precisely, the medium of this questioning, the learner constitutes and preserves themself and their sociality through the external finality of learning, an endless deferral of what they need to achieve.

In a similar fashion, Lewis questioned ‘the instrumentalization of poten-tiality’ in education arguing, specifically, that the generic potentiality of the student is ‘subjected to relentless actualization according to the necessities of market control and institutional capture’.37 Following Agamben’s account of study, Lewis opposes this (learning) logic of a ‘not yet that must be’38—a potentiality that must be actualised so as to fulfil a particular function—so that, in governmental terms, the (studious) subject is endlessly ‘commanded to self-actualise its latent potentiality’39—to the experience of im-potentiality, namely, of the ‘capability not to be’ which is also the capability ‘to be otherwise, to think otherwise, to live otherwise’.

Power, in fact, consists not only in the ‘separation of humans from what they can do’ but also ‘from what they can not do’41 and the modern subject of power is therefore being rendered ‘blind not to his capacities but to his inca-pacities’.42 Study then—the paradigm of ‘being-otherwise’—refers to an expe-rience of ‘absolute impotence’,43 namely a potentiality which is not absorbed into an external finality, ‘a potential that does not precede but follows its act’.44Concretely, the impotence of study rests on its always-already actualised ability to expose the pseudo-instrumental functioning of power.45Otherwise-ness, in fact, requires more (or less) than imagining a new manner of being, thinking and living: whatever manner is imagined has, in fact, to be other than the one(s) made possible under the current governmental horizon of possibility, which means that a reflection on the limits of governmentality (i.e., on its manners) is what is (end-lessly) needed. The notion of study then represents ‘the zero-point for critically examining both the logic of necessity that characterizes the current age of biotechnological control and the proposed alternatives’46 which means, in other words, that impotentiality stands for a capability-not-to actualisethe existing biopolitical forms of subjectivity by, precisely, exhibiting in what terms these are made possible.

Arguably, this is also how Foucault understands his own critique, namely, as a form of ‘permanent criticism’ which ‘point[s] out on what kind of assump-tions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest’.47 The form of life of the student, as opposed to the learner, would then be that of a permanent criticism addressed to what Foucault called ‘the contemporary limits of the necessary’, that is to say, what historically has been represented as ‘indispensable for the constitution of our-selves as autonomous subjects’.48 Foucault’s ‘permanent critique of ourselves’ consists in a ‘philosophical ethos characterizable as a limit-attitude’ which situ-ates us ‘at the frontiers of the outside-inside alternative’ and turns ‘what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory’ into a ‘possibility of transgression’. Transgression though coincides here with the exhibition of the limits that characterise the organisation of man’s potential, which is why Foucault speaks of his critique as a ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ and, more precisely, as ‘a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond’ which, neverthe-less, should ‘turn away from ... the claim to escape from the system of con-temporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society’.

To study is not to programme a society beyond the limits of the current soci-ety but, rather, to investigate under what circumstances a certain beyondness has become thinkable, which is to say, how human potentiality has been organised in this society.