“I Can't Read This”: Plagiarism, Biopolitics, and The Production of The Trans‐Dividual Student

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, Tony Iantosca situates the academic integrity policies of US colleges and universities, as well as student plagiarism, in biopolitical frameworks. By examining the aporias that result from student plagiarism in the context of neoliberal knowledge production, which produces and depends upon individualized, skills‐bearing students, Iantosca interrogates what educators can learn philosophically and pedagogically from the mutual misrecognition that occurs between institutional policy and the transgressing student. He frames this discussion with Michel Foucault's classic work on biopolitics as well as Roberto Esposito's immunitary paradigm in order to examine the implications of student illegibility for what Bernard Stiegler has called education's trans‐individuating potential. The argument that emerges is that student plagiarism has multiple, contradictory significances that can nonetheless teach educators important lessons about property and individualism, and these lessons must be retained as we reinitiate, rather than punish, plagiarizing students. Iantosca then closes the paper with a brief consideration of the pedagogical implications of this argument.