In this essay, Soyoung Lee explores the theme of mourning as a way of attending to a fundamental aspect of human experience that is bound to negativity. The essay helps readers to see that experience in a different light by drawing on what is shown to be an internal connection between mourning and having language. The dominant culture of contemporary education is preoccupied with management and control, and this renders hollow the understanding of the negative experience children go through. Such (...) experience, if it is acknowledged at all, is regarded as requiring intervention and perhaps correction. Yet negative experience, as Lee tries to show, is the very source of personal growth. This is to take human experience as wounded, and the wound as the very place for the creation of our own words. A hasty approach toward an individual's suffering, whether in the name of “healing” or “knowledge,” becomes a suppression of voice. In its denial of the otherness within the self, it neglects the possibilities of self-transformation. The essay pursues these ideas through a reading of contrasting works of art: some poetry by Paul Celan (in conjunction with Jacques Derrida's response to it) and Still Walking, a film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both artworks deal with their own wounds and words in ways that are instructive. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 148-158, February 2022.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 148-158, February 2022.

According to Miller, Levinas's ethics remains within an abstract or transcendental realm that does not connect with personal relations in the empirical world. Thus, Levinas's concept of the face, he concludes, is not a conception of a human face but only a kind of metaphysical speculation. This chapter investigates this assumption by exploring the concept of the face in ways that do not succumb to this formulation. In emphasising personal relationships as essentially reciprocal, Miller seems to be misunderstanding, if not (...) completely missing, the radicality of Levinas's ethics. The chapter shows that Levinas's philosophy indeed provides a ground for ethics that is, a means of understanding the practicality of ethics differently, beyond systematic approaches. It also shows how Levinas disrupts that discourse far more than does Miller: Levinas enables people to see teaching as an exposure. (shrink)

This chapter demonstrates the limits of Heidegger in terms of the capacity to recognise and acknowledge the absolute otherness of the other. It examines some of Heidegger's remarks regarding being and language, particularly in relation to his attitude towards other languages. The chapter moves from language to languages, and then to translation. It explores translation, beyond the technical understanding of it, as a site of diversity and plurality. Heidegger sometimes expresses the view that there has been a kind of decline (...) in being and in philosophy, which in a certain sense is a decline in thinking itself. And this has come about, according to him, partly through language; specifically through the displacement of Greek by Latin in the classical world. Derrida explores the topic of the mother tongue and madness in a long note in Monolingualism of the Other, and he refers to this also in Of Hospitality. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This chapter explores ways in which Roland Barthes's discussion of the encyclopaedia provides resources for thinking about education and research practice today. It begins with Barthes's analysis and critique of the Encyclopedie. Barthes, writing in 1964, engages with the Encyclopedie as an iconic product of its time, seeing it as conditioned by and, in effect, reinforcing a particular way of experiencing the world. The chapter considers ways in which a parallel critique is pertinent today and explores some current examples of (...) encyclopaedic form in relation to education and educational research. It examines the interplay between particular cultural products and their society, in which not only certain types of knowledge but also certain conception knowledge are produced and reinforced. The chapter presents particular understanding of language and knowledge that arises through these cultural products, particularly with regard to educational inquiry. (shrink)

Teaching poetry presents difficulties of various kinds, and these can be illustrative of wider curricular and pedagogical challenges. This chapter considers questions of knowledge and remembrance as these arise in two poems, placing these in relation to Jean‐Francois Lyotard's conception of the immemorial: Lyotard is concerned with a kind of repression in dominant conceptions of knowing and thinking, and with the insulation from experience that this effects. Celan addresses extremity of experience, entwined with massive and devastating historical upheaval; Heaney addresses (...) a desperately sad situation, but it is one that can arise in any community at any time, and is in this sense part of the ordinary human condition. Celan's poem is unthinkable without the moral political context, whereas Heaney's, however traced with Northern Ireland's Troubles, does not seem overly political; nor does it give us moral lessons in any obvious way. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Heidegger's account of technology has been discussed widely in the philosophy of education. This chapter focuses on the concept of Gelassenheit as developed in Heidegger's later thought as a key to overcoming technological ways of thinking. It shows the relevance of this to aspects of education, especially to the ways that teaching can be enhanced in order to do better justice both to learners and to what is studied. The discourse of education today seems to be preoccupied particularly with clarity (...) and transparency. It requires data to see things through and thus to monitor and control what has been and should be taught and learned. Cyberspace has extraordinary potential for building new communities, places for solidarity, as shown by developments such as the #MeToo movement. Yet vigilance is needed in respect of the ongoing development of technology, in order to witness how it opens up the world in unforeseen ways. (shrink)

The profession of teaching will be seen as inseparable from what one projects and produces with, that is, one's words, action, or work as ways of realising something in the world and of critical affirmation of what one inherits and comes into. This chapter explores ways of affirmation particularly by comparing Derrida and Deleuze. They are to be seen as at the intersection of two different strands of thought in poststructuralist philosophy. The idea of Gelassenheit highlighted ways of thinking that (...) are responsive and receptive to what comes from outside‐that is, by way of listening to what language says. This revealed possibilities for more responsible ways of thinking, in ways that manifest care for others and the world. Derrida and Deleuze both recognise and acknowledge the intimacy and closeness between them, and they often expressed gratitude for each other's insights. (shrink)