In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase ‘ways of knowing’, which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb ‘to know’. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître, and German has wissen and kennen. This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase ‘ways of knowing’: do problems arise with ‘ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître’, or with ‘ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir’, or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

Axiomatic and problematic approaches to ontology are discussed, at first in relation to the work of Badiou and Deleuze in mathematics. This discussion is then broadened focussing on problematics in Deleuze and Guattari’s critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis which results in an analysis of the implications of this discussion for education. From this, education as being already there, which is an assumption in some strands of philosophy of education, following Deleuze’s critique of axiomatic presentations of ontological identities, is described as (...) a repressive, stabilizing operation, which produces objectives which are characterized as peculiar things. By contrast, those aspects of practice, knowledge, behaviours and populations which cannot be accommodated and resolved by axiomatic formulae and fall from axiomatic systems are characterized as queer things that constitute counter cultures. (shrink)