Conference Agenda

Soyoung Lee’s Poetics of Alterity: Education, Art, Politics (2022, Wiley) thematizes diversity and its value via questions of translation and ethical obligation to what is other to our settled ways of thinking and being. We provide an introduction to the book (1), followed by three commentaries (2-4).

1. The book problematizes prevalent ways of thinking in education in neoliberal times, whose defining characteristic is control. In Heidegger, Derrida and Celan, the book finds a poetics of resistance, while at its heart is Levinas’s philosophy of alterity. It is in language, especially poetic language, that alterity is expressed. Hence, recovery of language from its susceptibility to control, and from closed economies of thought, offers the best prospect for education and diversity. Thus, the book embraces themes of translation, mourning and remembrance, and other aporetic experience fundamental to human beings. Struggle with such experience is to be affirmed as central to education. It enables recovery of responsibility in what we say and do: this is less to do with competence and achievement, and more with affirmation of our lives together. Art and the humanities crucially enliven experience of alterity, where meanings remain open to judgement without a rule. Thus, one is called upon to speak in one’s own words, in responsibility and in faith.
2. I reflect, first, on the understanding of thinking and language as something ‘always already open to what is outside and yet to come’. As Poetics of Alterity points out, words may ‘cut and divide’ (Chapter 1: 18); however, as educators we should always ‘attend to the openness’ of language. Here also lies the ethical nature of thinking. Second, I consider the call toward dwelling upon what we learn (Chapter 2: 59), attending to the openness of signs and the ‘messiness’ of teaching (Chapter 3: 64). Here, I linger on ‘perplexity’ and its etymology. Per-plexus: per, meaning with, by means of, through, around; and plexus, meaning woven, or intricate, even obscure. Third, I turn to the idea of teaching as ethical ‘all the way down’ (Chapter 7).
3. How does this book speak to practices of teacher education? My own experience was of being schooled in the subject knowledge of my specialism, with classroom management skills tacked on so that my students’ learning would be effective, smooth, and undisturbed. The relationality of teaching was effaced or understood to take care of itself, Poetics of Alterity offers a different, more accurate, perhaps more practical, picture: of teaching as exposure. To be a teacher is always already to be in relation to the other, a relation we cannot fully escape from but must live with. I want to bring these thoughts close to those of another philosopher of alterity, Stanley Cavell, especially regarding the problem of other minds as something not so much to be theorised as to be lived. Cavell’s different philosophical language may elaborate, and perhaps further, the practicality of Lee’s ethical picture of teaching.
4. I reflect on two issues. First, Lee makes the distinction, in her reading of Cassin, between classical Latin and Greek and their influence on European thought. Drawing on Irigaray’s (1999) commentary on Heidegger, I reflect upon consequences of this difference for the discipline of pedagogy. Has it become homesick or are we, as researchers, simply being nostalgic? The second issue concerns poststructuralist philosophy today and particularly the notion of affirmation in Lee’s reading of Jacques Derrida. I reflect, with Lee and Rita Felski (2015), on critique in post-poststructuralism. Is it perhaps time to develop a more affirmative conception, beyond the masters of suspicion? What would an affirmative criticality imply for curriculum theory and teaching?