The Ethics of Writing: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Pedagogy / Edition 224

by Peter Pericles Trifonas

Overview

In this compelling and timely treatise, cultural theorist and educator Peter Trifonas puts forth the first book-length study of Jacques Derrida's "educational texts": that is, those writings most explicitly concerned with the ethics and politics of the historico- philosophical structures constituting the scene of teaching.

“The Ethics of Writing” engages these aspects of Derrida's work on the institution of education, especially as it relates to the philosopher's association with the GREPH (Groupe de Recherches sur l'Enseignement Philosophiques) and the public movement to protect the teaching of Philosophy in France. Trifonas addresses the importance of deconstruction as a means of carrying-out analyses of pedagogical institutions and structures for the purpose of achieving ethical reforms of educational policy and curricular initiatives.

More specifically, the text examines how deconstruction allows us to re-think the socio-historical and ethico-philosophical aspects of pedagogical practices and policies, including pedagogical theories that have had direct bearing on the ethical and cultural ideals forming the reason of Western educational systems and the exclusion of its "Others."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847695584
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	02/09/2000
Series:	Culture and Education Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.76(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

Peter Trifonas is assistant professor of English education, social & cultural studies, global education, and transformative pedagogies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Acknowledgments Chapter 2 Polemical Introduction: A Pedagogical Prelude to Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida, Ethics, and the Scene of Teaching Chapter 3 1 The Cultural Politics of the Sign: The Ethics of Writing and the Other Chapter 4 2 The Ends of Pedagogy: From the Dialectic of Memory to the Deconstruction of the Institution Chapter 5 3 Technologies of Reason: Beyond the Principle of Reason as the Metaphysical Foundation of the University Chapter 6 4 Teaching the Other the Limits of Philosophy: Face-to-Face with the Violence of Difference Chapter 7 5 An Opening toward a praxis of the Future: The Ethics of Deconstruction and the Politics of Pedagogy Chapter 8 Index Chapter 9 About the Author

Editorial Reviews

Peter Trifonas stages an encounter between Jacques Derrida and education in The Ethics of Writing. Highly controversial and provocative, deconstruction takes on conventional wisdom in all its established forms and domains. True to this critical spirit, Trifonas forces us to rethink writing and education.

Douglas Kellner

Peter Trifonas’ book is a wonderfully concentrated framing of the ineluctable educational gambit run by Derrida’s unsettling practice of theory. We can do no better in following writing’s reasoning machinery, as given and illusive as it is, than by pursuing Trifonas’ relentlessly political and ethical questioning of the knowing institutions by which we live.

John Willinsky