Intercultural education of tolerance and hospitality

This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the current debate on intercultural education by focusing on the nature and limits of tolerance. Drawing on contemporary theorisations of the concept, it is suggested that while tolerance appears fundamental for confronting issues of difference, it has several caveats. The paper discusses the caveats in relation to differences that do not always co-exist harmoniously within the same society, and argues against the view that tolerance brings about automatically positive results to those who practise it. In the light of this argument, I propose that the ethics of hospitality, as elaborated by Derrida and Dufourmantelle, may provide a more viable approach to accommodating cultural difference. I conclude the paper with the implications for intercultural education. Specifically, I show that intercultural education has clung too long to the normative goals of modernity, and suggest that in order to go beyond these goals one must bring the ethical relation of responsibility for the other to the fore.     

‘You can always see it from a different angle’ — Art as Resistance

In this article, taking three selected works by the Danish artist Julie Nord as my point of departure, I will analyse and discuss the role of art in educational theory and practice. In this analysis and discussion I present two concepts, ‘resistance’ and ‘undecidability’, which are rooted in the theories of Dutch professor of education and director of research Gert Biesta and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, respectively. The two concepts are used to analyse the three works of art and then come to grips with the empirical part of the study. The empirical part explores how a Danish fifth‐grade class (ages 11–12) interacts with works of art characterised by these very things, resistance and undecidability. The point the article makes is that it is not always what is easy and unambiguous that offers the best conditions for learning and gives school pupils a desire to learn. Rather it is often what is full of resistance and is difficult to decipher and understand.     

德里达文学批评在中国的传播

在中国．德里达文学批评思想的传播，首先表现在翻译西方理论家评价“解构主义”的著作．以及德里达本人的原著；其次，中国学者在这些译著的理解基础上．结合中国的本土语境对“解构主义”文学批评思想重新作了梳理和评价．     

The university of the future: Stiegler after Derrida

Abstract

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 digital transformation of knowledge. The question of the university, the foundation of its authority and purpose is more than timely; it is urgent to any future philosophy of higher education. Will the university survive in the future and if so, for what purpose? We examine two philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, who take on this challenge. Derrida, writing at ‘the scene of teaching’, proposes new humanities for a university ‘without condition’, one with increasing autonomy to democratize it further. Stiegler takes issue with him on the conditions of the university of the future. Stiegler offers not an ‘anti-Derridian discourse’ but a ‘deconstruction of a deconstruction’ of Derrida. Stiegler’s critique of Derrida on the role of the professoriate and the university of the future expand the fissure between them. In this article, we argue that Stiegler’s reading of Derrida points to the university not as an anachronistic way of knowing displaced by the digital revolution but as vital to a politics of the spirit in a democratic future.     

Anarchist education and the paradox of pedagogical authority

This article interrogates a key feature of anarchist education; focusing on a problem with implications not only for anarchist conceptions of education, but for anarchist philosophy and practice more broadly. The problem is this: if anarchism consists in the principled opposition to all forms of coercive authority, then how is this to be reconciled with situations where justice demands the use of coercion in order to protect some particular good? It seems that anarchist educators are forced to deny coercive authority in principle, whilst at the same time affirming it in practice. This is the paradox of pedagogical authority in anarchist education. Coercive authority is simultaneously impossible and indispensable. Exploring this paradox through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s later work, and, in particular, his conception of justice as requiring openness to the singular situation, I argue that in exercising their authority anarchist educators encounter the aporetic moment in anarchism, experiencing what Derrida calls ‘the ordeal of the undecidable’. Understood this way, the paradox becomes less an indication of anarchism’s limitations than it does its value. For it is here that the problem of pedagogical authority is treated with the gravity that all questions of justice deserve.     

Education as Humanism of the Other

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds (like philosophy and education). From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be.     

同途殊归:几何学的例证意义——胡塞尔和德里达对几何学例证的不同解读

面对欧洲科学文化和人性的危机,胡塞尔运用历史现象学的方法 ,以对几何学起源的回溯为例证,试图赋予他的超文化的生活世界以超越的意义。德里达通过解构历史现象学方法论的合法性指出历史性的不可回溯性和延异性,指出回溯几何学起源的运动只不过是实现历史现象学目的论的例证。     

Passive education

Abstract

This paper does not present an advocacy of a passive education as opposed to an active education nor does it propose that passive education is in any way ‘better’ or more important than active education. Through readings of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and B.S. Johnson, and gentle critiques of Jacques Rancière and John Dewey, passive education is instead described and outlined as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not. As such, the object of critique for this essay are forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings. An underlying component of this argument is therefore also that education does occur outside of formal educational settings and that, contra Gert Biesta and his critique of ‘learnification’, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education.     

Deconstruction as Narrative Interruption

Because of the way it prioritizes interruption and calls into question the very possibility of producing coherent, selfcontained narratives, the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida is often thought to be intrinsically anti-narrative in its very structure; and yet there are those who insist that, to the contrary, deconstruction is a narrative exercise through and through. I maintain that both interpretive approaches fall prey to a serious misunderstanding of deconstruction. I will show that deconstruction should be viewed neither as a simple affirmation nor negation of narrative but rather as a radical perplexity in the face of narrative. Indeed, any serious engagement with deconstruction requires that we call into question the very nature, function, and limits of narrative practice.