Derrida on Language and Philosophical Education
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Derrida on Language and Philosophical Education Samir Haddad1 Accepted: 12 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The relationship between national languages and schooling is a recurring theme in Derrida’s writings on education, playing an important role in the challenge he mounts to traditional understandings of the French State’s involvement in the teaching of philosophy. In this essay, I follow this thread of thinking across several of Derrida’s texts, paying specific attention to his diagnoses of positions arguing for a universal philosophical language on the one hand, and those elevating French as the proper language of philosophy on the other. I demonstrate how, against these positions, an alternative understanding of relation between language and philosophical education starts to emerge in Derrida’s work, one in which translation is a key element. Keywords Derrida · French language · Education · National identity · Colonialism · Translation In an interview dating from 1988, Derrida is questioned about the way he challenges the distinction between philosophy and literature in his work, with the suggestion being that in doing so he risks erasing important distinctions between different genres. Is there, the interviewer asks, “a specifically philosophical writing, and in what way is it distinct from other forms of writing?” (Derrida 1995: 216). In response, Derrida is emphatic that he does not collapse philosophy into literature, but he also argues that these two genres of writing are not unified in themselves. He sums up his position as follows: In a word, and to respond to the very letter of your question, I don’t believe that there is “a specifically philosophical writing,” a sole philosophical writing whose purity is always the same and out of reach of all sorts of contaminations. And first of all for this overwhelming reason: philosophy is spoken and written in a natural language, not in an absolutely formalizable and universal language. That said, within this natural language and its uses, certain modes have been forcibly imposed (and there is here a relation of force) as philosophical. These modes are multiple, conflictual, inseparable from the philosophical content itself and from its “theses.” A philosophical debate is also a combat in view of imposing discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, rhetorical and pedagogical techniques. (Derrida 1995: 219) * Samir Haddad [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Fordham University, 441 E Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA
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There is no single form of writing specific to philosophy, Derrida here claims, because not only is philosophical discourse embedded in natural languages, it is multiply so. And this multiplicity makes possible another dimension of philosophical debate in addition to arguments over content or theses, namely a contest over the different modes, procedures, and techniques of philosophical expression and pedagogy. Now in many ways this issue and this contest can be seen to traver
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