| PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1996 |
Neutrality in Education
Denise Egéa-Kuehne
And Derrida's Call for "Double Duty"
Louisiana State University
There is no neutral place in teaching.
Here, for example, is not an indifferent place.[1]Today, no serious curriculum scholar would advance the argument
that schools in general and curriculum in particular are politically neutral.[2]A number of scholars have declared that if "the political neutrality of [schools, education, and] school curriculum was a commonplace assumption in the pre-1970s,"[3] it is obvious that it is no longer the case to anyone who cares to look at the development of education in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, many authors express a general consensus that the fates of society and education are tightly intertwined. Richard Brosio reports that "from the time of Horace Mann and the'common school' crusade of the 1840s, schools have had to deal with the conflicting imperatives of democracy and capitalism."[4] Effects of this conflict on education have been recorded through the years. Brosio confirmed that "the complex relationships between the school system and the larger host society have been described and analyzed quite effectively by educational historians, philosophers, and sociologists."[5] Yet attempts at exclusions of various types are reported regularly.
So-Called Nonpolitical Rationales for Exclusion
Annual surveys by People for the American Way show that threats to freedom of education and freedom to learn have been increasingly frequent, widespread, and serious. These surveys report on the activities of national organizations including Concerned Women for America, Citizens for Excellence in Education, National Legal Foundation, and Eagle Forum. Indeed, a rhetoric of excellence has long been used as a basis for excluding cultural diversity in order to achieve "educational effectiveness" and "educational choice."
For instance, the Hatch Amendment regulations have been used by right wing campaigns to justify the exclusion of "diverse social voices and treatment of controversial issues and ideas from the curriculum."[6] Almost half a century after the Brown v. Board of Education case (1954),[7] attempts of censorship to remove controversial voices from the curriculum are still reported, all aimed at preserving the "political neutrality" of education in order to improve "educational effectiveness."
In 1987, Podesta - then president of People for the American Way - warned against the risks of educational choice when students can "opt out" of any program of which their parents disapprove. He declared: "We are not talking about objecting to one story....We're talking about objecting to pluralism, to science, to religious diversity."[8]
Derrida sees such types of approaches as a "question of hegemonic centrality"[9] and warns against what Bachelard[10] called the danger of "unitary epistemology." He warns against a homogeneity of discourse possibly imposed by a "new university space, and especially through a philosophical discourse"[11] which would call for "the neutrality of a translating medium that would claim to be transparent, metalinguistic, and universal."[12]
While he is not in favor of the "new world order"[13] if it means complete unification, Derrida does not propound total dispersion either. While in the next quote he talks about European cultural identity, what he has to say is highly relevant here. Once more, we face
[a] double injunction: on the one hand...cultural identity cannot be dispersed (and when I say "cannot," this should also be taken as "must not" - and this double state of affairs is at the heart of the difficulty)....But, on the other hand, it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralizing authority which...would control and standardize....For by reconstituting places of an easy consensus, places of a demagogical and "salable" consensus...such normalization would establish a cultural capital at any place and at all times. It would establish a hegemonic center.[14]
The point of this paper is that behind the lure of apparent democratic universality and uniformity in education, where there is neutrality and frozen consensus, there is no possible authentic learning, no possible growth, no enrichment of our individual, national, and global capital of knowledge. Moreover, any effort to improve so-called "educational effectiveness" conceals the true dialogical nature of a genuine, authentic learning process.
Approaches Used to Deal With Political Elements in Education
A variety of approaches have been proposed to deal with controversial elements in curriculum. Some support neutrality whereby the subject matter would be politically neutral (but by whose standards?) For instance, Stephen Arons concurs with the 1979 Creation Science Report which states: "Until we can agree on whose values and ethics we are going to implement...no values can be taught by tax-supported school personnel."[15] It is obvious that very little would be left of a so-called neutral curriculum "purged" (cleansed?) of all material anyone would object to. Consequently, another possible approach consists in including elements which would balance off one against the other, which would neutralize one another.[16] Then again, one could accept a non-neutral curriculum as long as the contents consisted of elements from the common culture, that is common culture as documented by Hirsch's "cultural literacy"[17] and Bennett's "moral literacy."[18] Arons also supports individual choice, as represented by Schlafly's Eagle Forum for instance. However, the danger of such an approach is what Podesta calls "supermarket schools," or Hirsch's "shopping mall schools," or "cafeteria style schools."
The problem is that all these approaches share a certain concept of learning and knowledge supported by the positivistic view of ideas and values as internal ideal representations, quite distinct from their materially embodied expression (the idea of the object as distinct and separate from the actual object).
Problems Raised by Concepts of Idea and Learning
Many educators have already argued against this positivist discourse, yet it bears renewed scrutiny in terms of how it has been used by those advocating so-called "nonpolitical" education. For we need to remember that positivist discourses do not recognize that meaning is closely dependent on semantic differences, while it has been established that meaning is the product of, is created by, the interplay of these very differences.[19] Furthermore, this positivist/modernist separation, distinction, and opposition (the basic one being inside/outside), fundamental to what Derrida tried to expose as "the metaphysics of presence" in the major texts of Western philosophy,[20] helps us understand for example Schlafly's claim that the Hatch Amendment does not censor anything, does not remove ideas from the curriculum. It removes "only" books, topics, issues, and so forth.
These arguments make sense only in the context of their "naive doctrine of 'ideas'"[21] since they are founded on a dichotomous discourse characteristic of the metaphysics of presence hierarchical oppositions: mind/body, presence/absence, reality/appearance, thought/language, ideas/expression, content/form, message/transmission, literal/figurative, and so on. It is those dualistic separations and the binary oppositions on which they are founded, those rigid dichotomies precisely called into question by Derrida, which help us understand how the discourses which advocate censorship can still refuse to admit that politics are involved or censorship is taking place. Derrida insists that "one should not forget"[22] the assumptions thus being made.
Is it possible then, as the censors would have us believe, to exclude the expression of ideas without excluding those ideas themselves? More importantly still, when particular materials are excluded from the curriculum, and students are deprived of access to the knowledge these materials offer, at one and the same time, are they not exposed to discourses around censorship and the nature of ideas and their expression, which may be teaching them the very ideology contained within the censors' positivist discourse?
Freire is one educator among several who argued against what he called the "banking" concept of education (Derrida might say the economy of education) whereby "students are depositories and the teacher is the depositor."[23] Freire advocates a dialogical approach to education whereby it would not be "reduced to the act of one person's 'depositing' ideas in another, nor [could] it become a simple exchange of ideas to be 'consumed' by discussants."[24] For him,
The object of the investigation is not men (as if men were anatomical fragments), but rather the thought-language with which men refer to reality, the levels at which they perceive that reality, and their view of the world.[25]
Another example is offered by Bakhtin and his work on "dialogism" and what he calls "heteroglossia."[26] For him, "everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole - there is constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others."[27]
The acknowledgment that word-meaning is constituted in the action of dialogic utterance is what enabled such scholars as Freire, Bakhtin (Gadamer is another instance),[28] and of course Derrida, to go beyond Saussure's and other authors' structuralist accounts regarding language as "elaborate conventionalism" and "preschematization."[29] We must remain aware that it is the positivist philosophies of language which have been reflected in the justifications for educational censorship.
Developing "Intellectual Competence"
Guided by their ideological confidence and their eagerness to identify what they call contentious material, censors provide numerous examples of readings where various levels of linguistic resources are overlooked or excluded for the sake of a first level, supposedly clear, unambiguous, "transparent, metalinguistic, and universal" reading.[30] For instance:
Malamud is viewed as anti-Semitic in Levittown, New York, and is trashed along with Langston Hughes who is alleged by white school board members to be "anti-Negro"....The texts of Oregon must not cast aspersions on the Founding Fathers, and those of Louisiana must teach the benefits of free-enterprise economics....Books are screened for racial stereotypes and Huck Finn is finished in Winnetka, Illinois.[31]
Such examples could go on and on of "first level" reading approaches which would preserve the "bigotry" of hegemonic ideology, while depriving students of the most important, vital aspect of learning: having to wrestle with the various voices and ideas embedded in a text worth its salt, having to decide for themselves on issues in which antinomies and aporias are inherent, having (sometimes at what appears to be great risks) to responsibly take a stand on the perhaps seemingly undecidable.
So in effect, the main problem is not so much that students need at all cost to discuss the specific ideas excluded by blind censorship. Rather, the problem is that Rehnquist and Schlafly's approaches (for instance) to handling controversial elements in the curriculum are in fact depriving students from developing the necessary competence for dealing with the linguistic and "rhetorical dimensions of controversial ideas." Even more serious than that, such "neutral" approaches actually teach students to "disregard such nuances by actively teaching them a naive semiotic doctrine of univocal signs, signs for conveying ideas identified as having positively (rather than dialogically) endowed meanings which do not depend upon the rhetorical or pragmatic dimensions of the language in use."[32] In short, it deprives students of the opportunity to develop a command of the linguistic resources of their language, and a competence of social "praxis," as well as to practice responsible learning decisions.
Necessity of Otherness and Multiple Voices: Identity
From a dialogical, heteroglossic, non-neutral perspective, developing an ability to learn is therefore essentially dependent on developing a competency in understanding anything other than, different from, learners' prior knowledge and experience of self-otherness and the world.[33] The necessity of otherness and multiple voices has been discussed before. For instance, departing from his earlier more positivist perspective, Bruner believes that "self can, indeed must, be defined in terms of 'other.'"[34] Derrida goes even further by arguing that "identity is in fact constituted by the other."[35] He writes:
This can be said, inversely or reciprocally, of all identity or all identification: there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself.[36]
Therefore, encouraging the development of what has been called "intellectual competence" means including otherness and multiple, even conflicting voices (with oneself included), thus providing opportunities for critical reflection on the dialogical language in use. Excluding these voices, that is neutralizing education, is tantamount to a political decision not to educate.
When confronted with other and difference, several possible responses have been noted: (a) it can be ignored; (b) it can modify understanding to incorporate new meaning, which is effective in the growth and reflexive understanding of the self; or (c) it can be mistranslated into meaning already familiar. While (a) and (b) respect differences in the expression of otherness, in (c), the difference is never even acknowledged, much less learned. Eventually, one may develop an immunity, a blindness or a resistance, even an aversion or a fear toward new meaning, toward otherness.[37]
Consequently, (a) otherness is excluded and differences are minimized or ignored altogether; (b) again, individuals are deprived of an opportunity for actual "effective learning"; (c) more seriously still, individuals are exposed to a misrepresentation of the learning process itself (missing out on linguistic signification of meaning, hermeneutics of how signified meaning is understood, and so on); (d) tendentious, biased readings of works are attacked by censors; and (e) exclusion of "politically disfavored elements" occur in favor of "standardized...contents."[38]
What is lacking in such possible responses by readers to other and different is what Bruner calls competence for "the process of distancing oneself from one's thoughts,"[39] of taking an ironic stance toward the text. He declares that when this occurs, there is failure "to develop any sense of what I shall call reflective intervention in the knowledge...encountered."[40] Therefore, once again, in order for students to experience "effective" learning, and to develop this crucial metalinguistic competence, they must not be prevented from encountering controversial expressions, even though (or perhaps because) those might challenge the beliefs and values most central to their socio-cultural context and construed self-image. In fact, Doll discusses how "essential" it is to maintain a "tension between disequilibrium and equilibrium so that a new, more comprehensive and transformative reequilibration emerges,"[41] which itself will in turn eventually come into question.
Furthermore, Bruner points out how authority is intertwined with questions of self and otherness in authentic and effective education: "the introduction of a mode of schooling where you 'figure out things for yourself' not only changes one's conception of oneself and one's own role, but in fact undermines the position of authority that exists not only within the culture but in the very modes of address that one uses in discourse with others."[42] In this sense, Bruner concurs with Freire, Gadamer, and Bakhtin in underscoring the importance of "metalinguistic features of pragmatic language use," including what Bakhtin calls "indirect," "quasi-direct," and "reported speech." That intersects with Derrida's discussions on text, authority, authorship, and signature.[43]
In an implicit positivist nondialogical approach, not only do learning models assume, as mentioned earlier, that words are endowed with an intrinsic positivist meaning, independent of "dialectical determination within structures of difference and opposition," but they also assume that students, as "receivers" of instructional messages, also have "fixed positive identities, characteristics, and interests."[44] Positivistic identities of both "messages" and "receivers" only appear to guarantee what has been called a "teacher-proof" curriculum while safeguarding teachers and students against what they see as the risks of confusing tension and confusing reinterpretation. For in a positivist "effective factual or cognitive" approach, exposing students to reflection and reinterpretation, encouraging them to engage in questioning and exploring, is perceived as a threat rather than an enhancement to learning. However, isn't such an approach nothing but a lure? For instance, Derrida encourages readings which do not try to move a text toward some "overarching system of meaning" which would "make sense" of it. For reading
cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality which is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language ....The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.[45]
Barbara Johnson points out that when students are encouraged to limit themselves to a first level reading, they are in fact encouraged to ignore
(1) that the rhetoric of an assertion is not necessarily compatible with its explicit meaning; (2) that this incompatibility can be read as systematic and significant as such; (3) that an inquiry that attempts to study an object by means of that very object is open to certain analyzable aberrations (this pertains to virtually all important investigations: the self analyzing itself, man studying man, thought thinking about thought, language speaking about language, etc.).[46]
As a consequence, students are once more definitely short-changed on the possibilities of actual learning.
Our "Double Duty" as Educators
As educators, under the lure of making everything understandable and accessible to all, is our responsibility then to remove all obstacles and sources of possible contention, to "neutralize" education "through a translating medium that would claim [and this is the operative word, emphasis added] to be transparent, metalinguistic, and universal?"[47] Under the pretense of "pleading for transparency...for the univocity of democratic discussion, for communication in public space, for 'communicative action,'"[48] such a simplifying discourse "tends to impose" a thinking model through a language model.
Claiming [again, the operative word, emphasis added] to speak in the name of intelligibility, good sense, common sense, of the democratic ethic, this discourse tends, by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to discredit anything that bends, overdetermines, or even questions, in theory or in practice, this idea of language.[49]
Although talking about "what is called in Frankfurt 'transcendental pragmatics,'" Derrida uses a sentence which could be applied here: "These models coincide with certain institutional powers."[50] In Du Droit à la Philosophie, Derrida has questioned these institutional powers, as well as thoroughly discussed our responsibility as educators.[51] However, it does not mean rejecting all, for "we must be suspicious of both repetitive memory and the completely other of the absolute new."[52] Derrida has questioned language itself, that is "the heritage of our language and thought in and through the university."[53] He has also discussed how this same university might be able to create a space for "both using and criticizing"[54] this discourse. Furthermore, he offered the examples of the GREPH[55] and the International College of Philosophy,[56] as institutions which "would never be univocal, neutral, or transparent," but "exemplary place[s] for questioning the forms, structures, and institutions of education and communication - including the university."[57] In Du Droit à la Philosophie, Derrida expounds on the necessity to question "the foundation, legitimation, role and structures of the...institution."[58]
In The Other Heading, while discussing the future of European identity in what is called this "new world order," Derrida describes examples of what he terms a "double duty"[59] called for today in the face of multiple diversity.
1. It is necessary to recall tradition, but it is also necessary to remain open to the difference, to "that which is not, never was, and never will be."
2. It is necessary to welcome "foreigners," "not only to integrate them, but to recognize and accept [and respect] their alterity."
3. It is necessary to criticize "(`in-both-theory-and-practice,' and relentlessly) a totalitarian dogmatism," but also "a religion of capital that institutes its dogmatism under new guises, which we must also learn to identify."
4. It is necessary to cultivate "the virtue of such critique, of the critical idea, the critical tradition," but also to submit it to a "deconstructive genealogy," "beyond critique and questioning."
5. It is necessary to assume the uniquely European heritage of an idea of democracy, while also "recognizing that this idea is never simply given...but rather something that remains to be thought and to come."
6. It is necessary to respect "differences, idioms, minorities, singularities, but also the universality of formal law, the desire for agreement and univocity, the law of the majority, opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia."
7. It is necessary to tolerate and respect "all that is not placed under the authority of reason...different forms of faith" but also "thoughts that, while attempting to think reason and the history of reason, necessarily exceed its order, without becoming...irrational...acknowledging [the] limits" of the ideal of Enlightenment.
8. This double duty calls for responsibility,[60] "the responsibility to think, speak, and act" within aporetic situations, under double contradictory imperatives, but it "also calls for respecting whatever refuses a certain responsibility."[61]
Conclusion
This essay attempts to point out the dangers inherent to seeking exclusion based on rationales claiming to justify a drive for "educational effectiveness," "educational choice," and "excellence in education." It stresses that the variety of approaches proposed to eliminate or minimize contentious elements in the curriculum raises serious questions since they rely on a dichotomous positivist concept of idea and learning, founding their arguments on a discourse which cling to rigid binary oppositions. Pointing out to the necessity of otherness and multiple voices, within and without ourselves, it stresses that in order for authentically "effective" learning to take place, students must develop a serious "metalinguistic competence," and in order to do so, they must be exposed to analysis and discussion of controversial materials, to otherness, to multiple voices, and to complex multi-level discourses.
As educators in an increasingly diverse and complex world, isn't it our responsibility then not to simplify, to neutralize, or to translate curricula materials into a transparent medium? Isn't it not to eliminate or exclude complex or controversial elements of the curriculum, but on the contrary, to make sure that they are part and parcel of education, and that students develop the necessary skills to understand and analyze such material? Isn't it our responsibility to re-evaluate, re-consider, and re-interpret our position along the continuum of double duties described by Derrida? Isn't it to engage our students in a quest for knowledge which should take them way beyond the boundaries of their immediate socio-cultural context in space and in time? Isn't it to encourage them to take risks in learning and discovering the other, the unknown, while building up a greater sense of responsibility toward self-directed learning, and therefore truly unique identity building?
*** For a response to this essay, see Davis.
[1] Jacques Derrida, Du Droit à la Philosophie (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990), 114. English translation forthcoming, by Egéa-Kuehne.
[2] William F. Pinar, Understanding Curriculum (New York: Lang, 1995), 244.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Richard A. Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education (New York: Lang, 1994), xi.
[5] Ibid., 36-37.
[6] James Anthony Whitson, "The Politics of 'Non-Political' Curriculum: Heteroglossia and the Discourse of 'Choice' and 'Effectiveness,'" in Contemporary Curriculum Discourses, ed. William F. Pinar (Scotsdale, Arizona: Gorsuch Scarisbrick, Publishers, 1988), 282.
[7] Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
[8] Attacks on the Freedom to Learn, 1985-1986 (Washington, DC: People for the American Way, 1986), quoted in the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee's (ALA/IFC) Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom XXXVI, no. 1 (January 1987): 38.
[9] Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 38.
[10] One of his professors at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
[11] Derrida, Other Heading, 54.
[12] Ibid., 58, (emphasis added).
[13] Bush's term.
[14] Derrida, Other Heading, 38-40 (parentheses and emphasis in original).
[15] Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, reprinted 1986), 31 (emphasis in original report).
[16] See Minarcini v. Strongville School Dist. 541 F. 2d 577 (U.S. Ct. of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, 1976), 581.
[17] E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1987).
[18] William Bennett, James Madison High School: A Curriculum for American Students (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1987).
[19] See in Of Grammatology, how Derrida uses the notion of différance, and a system of differential relationships to undermine the notions of identity and sameness underlying the metaphysics of presence, and to reconsider the nature of knowledge. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
[20] See for instance Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
[21] Whitson, "Politics," 292.
[22] Derrida, Du Droit à la Philosophie, 113.
[23] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Ramos (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 58.
[24] Ibid., 77.
[25] Ibid., 86, (gender use in original).
[26] Bakhtin's word "polyglossia" designates the "plurality of languages, dialects, idiolects, jargons, linguistic habits and practices, etc., intermixing in actual language use," whereas his word "heteroglossia" "refers to the qualitative character of language used in such conditions." Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, ed. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
[27] Ibid., 426.
[28] In Truth and Method, Gadamer also points to the "dialogical character of linguistic understanding," (325-41). Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and ed. G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Crossroads, 1982).
[29] Ibid., 498.
[30] Derrida, Other Heading, 58.
[31] Arons, Compelling Belief, 15.
[32] Whitson, "Politics," 301-2.
[33] Here "otherness" does not refer to a blanket type of label, but includes what one of this paper's reviewers called "myriad specifics of different interrelationships encountered within educational settings." (communicated 24 January 1996) It also refers to the "otherness" within ourselves, such as described by Susan Griffin, "The Way of All Ideologies," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. N.O. Kehoane, M.Z. Rosaldo, and B.C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and to otherness within same-name groups.
[34] Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 13.
[35] Naas, "Introduction," in Derrida, The Other Heading, xlvi (emphasis in original).
[36] Derrida, Other Heading, 10 (emphasis in original).
[37] Again, see Griffin, "The Way of All Ideology."
[38] Whitson, "Politics," 307.
[39] Bruner, Actual Minds, 129.
[40] Ibid., 130.
[41] William E. Doll, Jr., A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum (New York: Teachers College Press), 10.
[42] Jerome S. Bruner, "The Language of Education," Social Research 49, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 851.
[43] These themes appear throughout Derrida's work, and are most prominent in the works cited in this paper, Du Droit à la Philosophie, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Dissemination, and The Other Heading. See also Glas, trans. John Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
[44] Whitson, "Politics," 313-14.
[45] Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158 (gender use in original text).
[46] Johnson, "Introduction," in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xvi (gender use in original).
[47] Derrida, Other Heading, 58.
[48] Ibid., 54-55.
[49] Ibid., 55.
[50] Ibid.
[51] See Denise Egéa-Kuehne, "Deconstruction Revisited and Derrida's Call for Academic Responsibility," Educational Theory 45, no 3 (1995): 293-309.
[52] Derrida, Other Heading, 19.
[53] Naas, "Introduction," xlix.
[54] Ibid, (emphasis in original).
[55] The Groupe de Recherche sur l'Enseignement de la Philosophie (GREPH) was founded in 1975 by Derrida and other scholars and students of Derrida's. It is "devoted to asking about the relationship between philosophy and teaching, between the teaching of philosophy and the historical, political, social, and economic conditions in which that teaching takes place"; Naas, "Introduction," li.
[56] The Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh) was founded in 1984 by Derrida and other scholars and is "a new pedagogical - and thus "political" - institution...an exemplary place for questioning the forms, structures, and institutions of education and communication - including the university." Ibid., xlix.
[57] Ibid., xlix.
[58] In the description of his 1983-84 seminar entitled Du Droit à la Philosophie (reprinted in his book with the same title, 1990, 9-11), a seminar given under the auspices of both the CIPh and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Derrida explains the necessity of questioning the foundation, legitimation, role, and structures of the philosophical institution in general, concluding: 'the guiding thread for this preliminary attempt: the example of the Collège International de Philosophie." Ibid., l.
[59] "This duty is without common measure with all that is generally understood by the duty, though it could be shown that all other duties perhaps presuppose it in silence," Derrida, Other Heading, 76.
[60] On Derrida's notion of responsibility, see Egéa-Kuehne, "Deconstruction Revisited."
[61] Derrida, Other Heading, 77-80.