Absence of knowledge. The case of Wactaw Berent's Nauczyciel

This article is an interpretation of Wactaw Berent's short story Nauczyciel [The Teacher] as a literary study of psychosis. Berent describes the indissoluble intertwining of the protagonist's illness and the pathology of the educational system that is responsible for the escalation of mutual violence between the teacher and his students. For the protagonist, school becomes a catalyst of his sadistic yearnings, which develop in situations that pertain not to teaching, but to acquiring the most advantageous position in structures of power and economy. This is how a school subject is constituted as the absence of knowledge (understood as the act of thinking with others). The void left by the absence of knowledge is then filled in by violence.