The Revolutionary becoming of education

Loïck Roche

Deputy CEO

Igensia Education Group

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Training Beyond Employability

If training were only to fulfil its stated purpose — the employability of learners — it would certainly accomplish something useful. But it would miss the point.

So what is the point?

The point lies beyond training. Beyond mere employability. Employability, of course, remains a given, a basic requirement. But it can no longer be viewed as an end in itself.

The point, then, is that learners — once trained, once they become professionals — should be able to create a positive impact. Through their example, through their daily embodiment of values, emotional intelligence, gestures, and their approach to problems. In some way, they should, in turn, become trainers — through the way they work and interact with others each day.

From there, we must understand that all training must involve a movement of deterritorialisation.

Yes — just as any training should open up new territories, it must also, within a system of singularities, foster a shared future. A future that might even be... revolutionary.

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To Train is Also to Step Aside

And yet, before making the revolution, trainers must be careful not to fall into a sense of omnipotence. Trainers must internalise what should be obvious: the goal of training is its own cessation. Training must be seen, simultaneously, as an ending and a beginning... a revolutionary one.

Because training must aim at enabling freedom — that is, empowering learners to unleash their own potential — the trainer must know how to step back.

To limit one’s own omnipotence is to acknowledge one’s areas of powerlessness — omnipotence and powerlessness being two sides of the same, devalued coin. Consider this, for example, in the context of management training: we don’t really change. So we shouldn’t set out to change people. But — and this is where true power lies — even if we don’t change, we can do better with who we are.

So the goal of training — taking management training as an example — is not to change people, but to enable them to do better with what they are, and to engage in a process of growth. In this sense, the notion of "knowing how to be" is particularly apt: it’s not about being, but about knowing how to be.

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Transmission Does Not Happen Through Words Alone

Even before stepping back, before limiting any sense of omnipotence, trainers must ask themselves: What do I carry? What do I want to transmit? And how can I transmit it? This must be done in alignment with the organisation — its resonance, purpose, mission, and vision — but also in alignment with oneself, one’s relationship to work, desire, and sense of self.

Which means that, as trainers, we must work on our own alignment — or realignment. Indeed, if we are to transmit something — even just energy — and if we believe, as Alexandre Croibier (Kohé Consultants) says, that high-performing organisations are those that generate energy every day, then we must ourselves be full of energy, inhabited, alive.

Then comes the question of how to transmit what we carry. Continuing with management training — which serves here as a case study — we must understand that almost nothing gets through by subject-verb-object structures. Certainly not energy.

Put differently, what speaks to the head, doesn’t really speak at all. “We are not thinking frogs, not objective recorders with refrigerated guts” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882).

In other words, if we want to transfer energy, if we want to set people in motion, to make them active participants in their own learning — and we all agree that this is the holy grail — then it must go through the body, through what feels true, or at least what cannot be faked.

So it is no longer me who must speak, but my body. And through my body, what I am, what I carry.

To put it simply: “It’s not the head that thinks — it’s the body” (Etienne Klein).

A Training Begins as a Physical, Almost Animal Encounter

Training is not — at least initially — about minds connected to other minds. To train is not to evangelise. At the beginning of training, there is no Word. Training begins as body-to-body. It is, above all, an animal connection.

Why animal? Because at first, training is about physical connection, emotion, and sensation — rather than intellect.

Why again animal? Because we must give, and give physically. We must be ready to give something of ourselves. Just as a teacher must “bleed” a little, a trainer — to borrow a word from Deleuze — must leave some of their own skin behind. “We must give birth to our thoughts in pain, and maternally endow them with our own blood, heart, ardour, joy, passion, torment, consciousness, and destiny” (Nietzsche).

Giving something of oneself — physically — belongs to the realm of the sacrificial, of the sacred.

Yes, there is something sacred in training.

Which is why I cannot speak beautifully about a subject unless I am deeply inhabited by it, unless I live it, unless I am moved by it myself. For training to work, something must pass between learner and trainer. There must be a difference in potential, a spark, a current — something of desire.

What’s at stake, for the trainer, is not only to reach what is useful — already “not bad,” such as saying what one does or, better, doing what one says — but to touch what is essential: Being what one says, Being what one does.

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Training as a Revolutionary Becoming

What is true for the trainer is also true for the learner. If the learner feels nothing, if no inner truth is stirred, no emotion, no doubt, no disruption — there is little chance that the training will have any real effect once its initial impact fades.

Put differently, if learners don’t leave a session shaken, even just a little — if no emotions are triggered, if their minds are not cracked open, even slightly — if the trainer is not a launcher of percepts — then the training may very well miss its deeper mark.

We must understand that understanding only comes through emotion (Laurent Terzieff); that we first learn through feeling, and only then through thinking (Albert Camus). Neuroscience says the same today: if you don’t feel it, you don’t get it.

As Nietzsche taught, only experiential knowledge is valid. We must first grasp things subjectively — through sensation — and only then work toward objective understanding — through clarification. The goal is to move from percepts to concepts. Where body and mind unite. And simultaneously, to create a thinking in motion.

To think in motion is to create deterritorialisations (Deleuze), excavations of thought, implosions, explosions, constructions and deconstructions (Derrida).

Training, as we’ve seen, is a becoming. A revolutionary becoming. That is to say, something that must engage with the unthought. With what — literally — has never been thought before.

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The Rhythms of a Training Journey

So what are the different phases of a training journey?

The first phase is preparation. A lot of preparation. Not only to master the training content itself, but to reach a point where you speak with enthusiasm (Deleuze). And that can only happen, as we’ve seen, if you truly carry something within you. If you genuinely have something to say and to give. Something to stake — in the truest sense of engagement (from the same root as "to pledge"). What I want to transmit, to the point of bleeding for it — to the point of leaving, as we've seen, a bit of my own skin behind.

What separates a great trainer from another — or a great facilitator from another — is precisely this capacity to give something of oneself. “You must have a great music within you if you want to make life dance” (Nietzsche).

To speak with enthusiasm means to find what you're saying interesting — which doesn’t mean finding yourself interesting (Deleuze). It means finding the subject you’re exploring, the process you're engaging in — and I would even say, embracing — utterly fascinating.

The second phase is repetition. To repeat a lot. Which doesn’t mean saying the same thing to the same people, but multiplying experiences with different audiences, in different contexts, and allowing the training to evolve with each iteration.

The third phase is inspiration. That moment when you connect two ideas that had never been linked before. Letting your guard down, allowing emptiness to exist, opening yourself up to the unknown, to your innocence, to transgressions and eruptions of the unconscious. Thinking as you speak. Thinking like water flows. Creating new configurations. “The unconscious is not a theatre where Hamlet and Oedipus eternally replay the same roles. It is a factory. It produces” (Guattari).

The fourth phase is a moment of suspension. When learners — who have now become co-creators — generate a collective intelligence, a shared movement of thought.

This is the moment when, thanks to the group — sometimes even in the silence — I manage to place myself in their folds the way a surfer places themselves in the wave (Deleuze).

And we then realise that training, in its deepest purpose — to paraphrase Lacan — is where the It (Ça!) happens.

Training is not designed to be understood. It is designed to be used.

Which also means that no training is ever the same — not in its destination, and not in its resonance with who you are, your history, your background, your cultural references. Repetition is never duplication — it is always deliberate, always where the It happens.

The trainer is never a mere repeater. Not a driver, not an operator. But someone who gives themselves permission to authorise themselves.

Proof, if needed, that pedagogy is never a conquered province. Never a standardised domain.

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Training as Energy and Joy

And one final point: how do we know if a training has succeeded?

By the energy it generates. What Georges Snyders called joy. Energy and joy as true judges of value. An energy that opens paths for other energies. A joy that gives rise to other joys.

“We feel joy [we generate energy] when we fulfil a power, when we complete a potent act. I conquer a fragment of colour, I move into colour — that is what it means to realise a power” (Deleuze).

As we read on Cairn.info: “For a pedagogy to be effective, it must align with the desire of the participants.” “It must help them grow, in order to build the professional life they desire” — and thus, in turn, transmit joy, and energy. That which is useful. And that which is essential.

A good training session is magma. Lava. Motion. Music. It is emotion.

As much emotion as intelligence.

To succeed in training is to experience happiness — yes — but not a selfish happiness. Otherwise, it means nothing.

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Discover Loïck Roche's lecture at the conclusion of the Business Science Institute's international spring seminar (March 27 & 28, 2025).