The Unteachable

Ansgar Allen's The Unteachable concerns itself over the course of a single, unbroken paragraph, with the situation of the village teacher. He retreats to the attic with the entire Nietzsche, the entire Schopenhauer, nearly all of Cioran, so he claims, and the odd Klossowski. Most of the book engages his reading of these figures—or the suggestion the teacher might have read them—through occasional quotes, tales of village schooling, and a returning obsession with a couple of phrases from the first part of Klossowski’s essay on Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody. The book entertains the heretic idea that the multiple inanities of institutional life have pretty much accomplished the great affirmation, the profound Yes to existence that Nietzsche once proposed. The unteachable is this debased everyday—it has served to void or at least supersede what were once minority concerns. These are now the banalities, the everyday terrors and the regular discomforts of educational institutions at their most decrepit and enduring. They have achieved a kind of erasure of history and morality, a ground zero that even Nietzsche could not anticipate.