The descriptions of the sage, the teacher and ultimately the learner, learning, and the learning community are always appearing dialectically in opposition, conflict and even disruption of the dominant figure in education: the juridical, judgmental and self-certain hegemon. Dewey wrote against the quest for certainty in philosophy and thereby proclaimed another path for thinking that moved experimentally, provisionally, and always under the fundamental claim that historical was open-ended, incomplete. His critique was important for my doctoral dissertation, and remain so today, although I rarely write about Dewey. But his voice is present, and part of a chorus of others, whenever I deploy the category of the ‘not yet’, which always denotes the temporality of becoming that learning moves within.
The ‘other’ that
Irigaray describes is not the dialectical ‘other’ that is confronting my
prototypical sage and first learner. And
it is not clear to me if it is the ‘foreigner’ (l’etranger) in Derrida. But
it might be the one confronted by the xenos,
who Derrida also takes up, the one who confronted ‘father Parmenides’ with his
inversion of the fundamental ontological claim about Being and thinking. This xenos
appears in the Preface to Being and
Learning:
Who is this question
that begins
again the conversation
of
philosophy?
The Question is
identified, recognized
as the speech of the
stranger,
the one who arrives
from abroad.
….
Derrida: “the question
of the stranger is a question of the stranger, addressed to the stranger…As
though the stranger were being-in-question or being-in-question of the
question.”
….
Here the name given to
this
stranger by Plato
is…stranger (xenos)
….
Derrida reminds us next
of Socrates
Being the question
Identifying himself as
the stranger, the outsider
on that day he defended
himself,
offering his
apologia
in his own speech. (BL xiv-xv)
What is announced in the
Preface is the figure of the thinker as xenos
(stranger), who is ‘being-in-question’, which is to say, the one who enacts the question, the fundamental critique of
power. This is why Socrates is held out
as the exemplar, although we can already identify this critique in Heraclitus
with his anti-political politics (philosophy qua dissensus), and his refusal to
participate in the writing of the laws of Ephesus.
Paired with Schürmann’s
description of the twofold gaze of originary thinking (retrospective,
prospective) is the twofold manifestation of originary thinking as
deconstruction and (de)constuccion: razing and building. I’m tempted to describe this in the way I
presented it to my HUHC students in the fall semester (2014) when we were
thinking through the polemos
fragments of Heraclitus, and turned to Homer, Virgil, and Paul and necessity of
breaking before making.
The link here is to the
making of freedom via the breaking that happens with emancipation. Emancipation is a breaking of and from the
dominant order, and in the case of the philosophical project of originary
thinking it is an internal rupturing of and from the quest for certainty. The confrontation yields the question of
Being as the question of freedom. And
this is how the meditation on 1/18/05 gets underway: “when the student is drawn
into learning, she is drawn…into an encounter with Being…(re)collected with the
question concerning the be-ing of human, with the phenomenon of freedom.”(BL 350)
The confrontation under
description is the most fundamental conflict of temporalities, demonstrated
acutely in Socrates’ confrontation with the Athenian court. And it is precisely this confrontation that
Arendt, in her reading of Plato, identifies as the incompatibility of
philosophy and politics. But here I
have to read Arendt against Arendt, and insist (through the Arendt of Life of the Mind) that thinking may
indeed protect us from the banality of evil, from thoughtlessness. Thinking not
philosophy (in the Platonic form), but a first philosophy nonetheless. Only thinking, happening in the nunc stans (the time and space ‘outside’ history) allows us to confront
the status quo, to make critique, and, what’s more, to make another world. Only
thinking grants us the time and space, grants us entry into the Open, where
together with others we take up the ‘not yet’.
Only thinking (philosophy that is not organized around the quest for
certainty) can confront the political, the normative, and in the case of my
project disrupt what my late friend and dear colleague Ilan Gur Ze’ev called
‘normalizing education.’ Only thinking
can at one and the same time confront normalizing education and move in what
Ilan called the Orcha: “an improvised moment that is to
find/create its own destiny.”
The Orcha is the movement in/with becoming
that should not be mistaken as a utopian gesture. The Orcha
is a movement as struggle, made via confrontation Auseinandersetzung. [recall from 10/12/14: Auseinandersetzung, which means both ‘confrontation’, but also ‘discussion’
and ‘engagement’. Auseinandersetzung has everything
to do with originary thinking …the ‘collision zone’...] Recall, first and
foremost the force that moves this confrontation is the one that confronts the
learner, i.e, the question of the sage.
And before that we have the original confrontation that forces upon the
sage the modality of ‘being-in-question.’
This confrontation is the original turning that is repeated each and
every time thinking propels learning:
“the event of learning appears with the appearance of the modalities of
‘teacher’ and ‘student’…in the absence of the project of ‘certainty’ that is
abandoned with the seizure of the solitary ego and the emergence of the
intersubjective in/with the (re)collection with Being. Poetic dialogue, or the (re)making of the
original, the (re)productive artwork of learning, follows upon the diminishment
or destruction of the self-certain
subject who stands apart.”(BL 351)
The original confrontation, Auseinandersetzung, re-places the ‘self’
into the modality of learning where they are (de)construccion (under
construction). Again, this is hardly a
‘utopian’ scenario in any kind of ‘positive’ or romantic sense. Ilan described it well when he echoed Adorno
and wrote of a ‘negative utopia,’ which is to say, a project of the blues. The learner as ‘being-in-question’ is placed
within the existential condition of stranger (xenos). That is, placed
within the place of thinking. And to be
placed in this condition is to be confronted by and with freedom, the negative
utopia of an unbound uncertainty; becoming
as (de)construccion, making from breaking.
On 1/18/05 this (de)construccion is recalled as “destuktion ‘estrangement’, for it
identifies [the] releasement of the learner…that turns away from ‘self’ and
towards what remains ‘beyond’ and ‘unknown’.
To be as learner is to live in/with the encounter with…the freedom of
the precinct of the nothing, the emptiness of the ‘not yet.’ To live in/with this abode is to abide in the
shadow of the ‘no,’ the renunciation of the authorial and judgmental voice…to
live an-archically…. To be (de)construccion is to be the learner who
has entered in-to the realm of the in-complete…the be-ing of freedom
encountered with the sublime presencing/absencing of Being’s processural
twofold play.”(BL 351)
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