Over the course of a single, unbroken paragraph, The Unteachable entrains the story of a village teacher who retreats to the attic with the entire library of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, most of Cioran, and the odd Klossowski. The teacher’s engagement with these figures appears in scattered quotations, anecdotes from village schooling, and a chronic fixation on Klossowski’s essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody.” Allen entertains the heretical idea that the multiple inanities of institutional life have accomplished a great affirmation, the profound YES to existence that Nietzsche once proposed. The “Unteachable” is this debased everyday condition, emerging from the banalities, the commonplace terrors and regular discomforts of educational institutions at their most enduringly decrepit. In their accumulation, these inanities enact a quiet erasure of history and morality, producing a ground zero of experience that even Nietzsche could not have foreseen. The result is a darkly comic, philosophically charged portrait of modern education’s collapse—and the strange, defiant clarity that flickers in its ruins.

ANSGAR ALLEN is the author of books including a short history, Cynicism, and the novels Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript, and The Sick List. He is editor-in-chief at Erratum Press, and he co-founded Risking Education, an imprint of Punctum Books. His writing has been published across a range of journals, books, and media, appearing in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, German, Czech, Estonian, Farsi, and Greek translation. Allen lives in Sheffield, England.