This article examines Jacques Derrida’s work of self-reflection on his own teaching practice by using as a guiding thread the problematics of reproduction in the seminars of the 1970s. The first part of the article examines the sequence of seminars taught by Derrida at École normale supérieure from 1971 to 1977 to show how the concept of reproduction is deconstructed by Derrida across several seminars. Derrida systematically demonstrates, across several themes and fields (sociology and economy, biology and sexuality, art, technique, (...) ontology, and so on), that the critical recourse to the concept of reproduction (for instance, in its Marxist form) risks being complicit in the reproductive system it criticizes. The deconstructive motif of débordement is introduced to problematize this onto-logic of re-production. The second part of the article analyzes more specifically the unpublished seminar “GREPH, le concept de l’idéologie chez les idéologues français” (1974–75), in which Derrida examines the seminar function, his role as a teacher, and his own situation within the French educational system. In particular, Derrida offers a deconstructive critique of the reproductive effects of teaching, and of the institution of philosophy inasmuch as it functions as a reproductive machine. This work of deconstruction is done in the seminar notably through readings of Marx, Engels, and Althusser, with special attention to the concepts of ideology, reproduction, and sexual difference. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of theories of performativity in order to analyse Max Weber’s sovereignty–legitimacy paradigm. First, I highlight an essential articulation between legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty, as the autopositioned power-to-be-oneself). Second, I identify a more originary force of legitimation, which remains foreign to the order of performative ipseity because it is the condition for both its position and its deconstruction. This suggests an essential fallibility of the (...) performative, which implies a ‘mystical’ legitimacy and a paradoxical, divisible and self-differential representation of sovereignty. The structural differentiality of legitimacy and sovereignty signifies an irreducible coloniality of law and language, but also suggests the possibility of an unconditional resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond determined representations of powers, dominations, sovereignties or resistances. This reflection is triggered by a reading of Cynthia Weber’s theory of ‘performative states’, describing sovereignty under the form of an impossible ontology, which leads me to elaborate the notion of legitimation-to-come as a non-ontological ‘concept’: this notion of unconditional legitimacy, beyond sovereignty, binds beliefs and phantasms to the unpresentable force of the event. Pursuing the efforts of scholars such as Rob Walker and Cynthia Weber, I sketch the implications of this archi-performative legitimacy regarding the methodological protocols of International Relations and sociology, in view of elucidating the persistent ontological presuppositions of these disciplines. (shrink)

Higher education has not been spared from the effects of the disruptive aspects of technology. MOOCs, teach bots, virtual learning platforms, and Wikipedia are among technics marking a digi...

Efforts to develop democratic schools have moved along particular rules and standards of ‘reasoning’ even when expressed through different ideological and paradigmatic lines. From attempts to make a democratic education to critical pedagogy, different approaches overlap in their historical construction of the reason of schooling: designing society by designing the child. These approaches to democracy make inequality into the premise of equality, assuming a consensual partition of the world and the need for specific agents to monitor partitioned boundaries, thus reinserting (...) differences as the basis of practice. Democracy, however, according to Jacques Rancière, only becomes visible when its partitioning is challenged under the opinion of equality. Yet, undoing the epistemological dogma of planning embodied in the notions of ‘critical’ and deliberative democracy might also involve confronting the comparative style of thought which provides the epistemological ‘rules’ that insert inequality as equality. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome and Derrida's justice help extend Rancière's democracy and equality into unfamiliar terrain. What implications might this have for thinking about educational policy and curriculum? The argument, ironically, maintains Enlightenment attitudes about reason and rationality, but while ‘trying’ different epistemological rules and recognizing how the epistemological and ontological fold into one another it provides an alternative understanding of education and democracy. (shrink)

Through readings of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and 'The Age of Hegel', attention is given to two of the problematic types of relationships that philosophy can have with education. These engagements, alongside a reading of 'The Antinomies of the Philosophical Discipline: Letter Preface', show how Derrida’s thought can prescribe no educational programme and instead troubles educational proclamations and certainties. Throughout his life, Derrida negotiated his relationships to the educational systems and institutions to which he was responsible, these negotiations, though, were (...) not indicative of a belief in any ontologically grounded educational truth. Quite to the contrary, as I will claim, Derrida’s thought is remarkable for its deflation of the myth, stretching at least as far back to Plato’s Republic, that philosophy can discover and prescribe the practical means for its own educational good. The argument presented in this article is that Derrida’s thought is particularly fertile when it comes to educational reflection precisely because it does not close down, presuppose, or prescribe, and that these characteristics also allow for generative contradictions in Derrida's educational and philosophical thought and practice. (shrink)

Based on archival research, this article analyses the pedagogical gestures in Derrida's (largely unpublished) lectures on hospitality (1995/96), with particular attention to the enactment of hospitality in these gestures. The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, since the large-group university lecture has been widely critiqued as a pedagogical model, the article seeks to retrieve what may be of worth in the form of the lecture. Second, it is relevant to analyse the pedagogy of lectures that address the topic of (...) hospitality, as there would be a performative contradiction in teaching inhospitably about hospitality. (shrink)

Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari's thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari's critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of semiocapitalism's (...) ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. (shrink)

My paper examines Derrida's attempts to resist, on the one hand, what he thought of as the increasing international hegemony of American English as the technolanguage of communication, and, on the other hand, forms of linguistic nationalism, when using the resources of the French language to deploy the syntagma: démocratie à venir. It does this by investigating what happens when claims about democracy are made in such a way as to be singularly idiomatic – made from a cosmopolitan point of (...) view that takes into account, rather than vitiates à la Kant, the singular poeticity of idioms. It contrasts Derrida's analysis of the relationship between the national, democracy and idiomaticity with Tocqueville's nationalistic claims; examining, in particular, the issue of how language supposedly binds people together, the role of singularity and generality in thinking about idioms, the divide between originary and techno-scientific idioms, and Derrida's practice of writing in plus d'une langue. It also outlines how, paradoxically, it is a form of idiomaticity and not linguistic instrumentality that disrupts the logic of appropriation, the logic inscribed in the neighbouring, though different, conceptual values of idion, proprius and le propre. (shrink)

A TrajectoryIn an essay that is now a classic piece in understanding post-modern culture, Jean-François Lyotard wrote, “[e]clecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong” (Lyotard 1989: 76). The boundaries have become blurred in both positive and negative senses. Geographical borders have loosened through ever-increasing mobility as cultural exchanges become more accessible (...) and are rapidly flowing through electronic exchanges in the cyberspace arena. Almost a quarter century after Lyotard described the present era as the time of eclecticism, the world has become more global, and the demand for cross-, inter-, and multi-cultural knowledge has become stronger than ever. In this context, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and world-citizenship have become some of the expressions with which the present time is defi. (shrink)

In the large and complex landscape of pedagogy, the focus seems to have turned away from the concept of teaching and towards a stronger emphasis on learning, probably supported by neo‐liberal ideology. The teacher is presented more as part of the force of production than as an autonomous performer of a mandate given to him/her by society. He/she is supposed to supply knowledge that is considered useful to a society geared to production and consumption. During the past few decades, enlightenment (...) as a legitimising concept for education has been challenged from different angles, both by a self‐critique from within and from external forces. One angle of approach is the questioning of the relationship between the state and education, by way of a critique of modernity. Another approach comes from a critique of knowledge, which has lost most of its universal implications and is left with more pragmatic and utilitarian considerations. Into this landscape of lost legitimisation, I will make an attempt to visualise an impossible/possible position for teaching, featuring ancient, contemporary and phantom‐like figures. I am suggesting the concept of transformation as an alternative to development or improvement, which I find to be concepts with a close link to modernity and its linearity. By a careful and conscious use of the word transformation, taking Derrida's intensified focus of language into account, a possible active position might be intimated in spite of the fundamental critique, which has been directed at pedagogy and its imperialistic implications from different angles. (shrink)

This article explores Derrida's claim that teaching is a deconstructive process. In order to explore this claim, the Derridean concept of "erasure" is explored. Using the concept of erasure, this article examines two important aspects of teaching: the name that teachers establish for themselves, and, teaching against social power from a Derridean perspective. Ultimately, the paper confirms Derrida's claim that teaching is indeed a deconstructive practice.

This article seeks to locate the seminar series that Derrida delivered at the École normale superieure during the mid-seventies within the broader political and theoretical aspirations of the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique (GREPH), particularly considering the group’s thematization and politicisation of pedagogy in the history of philosophy and the philosophical establishment. It also aims to contextualise Derrida’s recourse to a Marxian and Marxist problematic as part of these aspirations in view of his longer-term engagement with the question of (...) philosophy in Marx and Marxism. The article brings together these two contextual dimensions of Derrida’s teaching activities at the ENS through a close reading of the seminar series he delivered on the agrégation topic of Theory and Practice in 1976–7. This reading focuses specifically on how Derrida mobilised the Althusserian problematic to attempt to transform the role and function of the agrégés-répétiteur (a position he shared with Althusser at the ENS) within the frame of reference of his political work with GREPH. (shrink)

The relationship between national languages and schooling is a recurring theme in Derrida’s writings on education, playing an important role in the challenge he mounts to traditional understandings of the French State’s involvement in the teaching of philosophy. In this essay, I follow this thread of thinking across several of Derrida’s texts, paying specific attention to his diagnoses of positions arguing for a universal philosophical language on the one hand, and those elevating French as the proper language of philosophy on (...) the other. I demonstrate how, against these positions, an alternative understanding of relation between language and philosophical education starts to emerge in Derrida’s work, one in which translation is a key element. (shrink)