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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.

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Notes

  1. Du droit à la philosophie was translated into English in the early 2000s in two volumes titled Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1 (Derrida 2002a) and Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (Derrida 2004). For an overview of the central themes addressed in Du droit à la philosophie, see my essay “Derrida and Education” (Haddad 2014). There I summarize one part of Derrida’s treatment of the relationship between language and philosophical education, his reading of Descartes, which I explore in greater detail below.

  2. For a detailed account of the Haby reforms and the debates surrounding them, see Vivienne Orchard’s Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy (2011: 46–78).

  3. For a comprehensive account of this history, deeply informed by a Derridean perspective, see Katie Chenoweth’s The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (2019). While much of Chenoweth’s focus is on the role that the newly invented printing press played in the establishment of French as a mother tongue for France, one chapter, which is framed by a discussion of the themes from Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other (1998) that I discuss below, is devoted to developments in pedagogy.

  4. “Nationalité et nationalisme philosophiques” was the topic Derrida investigated in his seminar across the 4 years (1984–1988) following the seminar on “Du droit à la philosophie,” and much of this focused on the German tradition. See, for example, the seminar sessions published from 1984–1985 in “Onto-Theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)” (Derrida 1992) and Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity (Derrida 2020). These published sessions do not, however, discuss issues in education at any length. Questions of the mother tongue and education in Nietzsche are raised by Derrida in “Otobiographies” (Derrida 1985), a text we now know has its origins in the second session of the 1975–1976 seminar “La vie la mort” (Derrida 2019).

  5. I mentioned earlier that the text of the essays on Descartes has its origins in Derrida’s 1981–1982 seminar, “La langue et le discours de la méthode.” In the first session (the only session so far published), Derrida describes the seminar as a whole as “a seminar on translation” (Derrida 1983: 38).

  6. To say that Derrida does not examine the pedagogy of translation at any length in his writings is not to say that we cannot learn from these writings when thinking about this topic. Indeed, in his seminars Derrida consistently uses translation as a pedagogical tool, and an analysis of the way he does this could form the basis of a theory that we ourselves might develop. I take a first step in doing this in my essay “Questions of the Foreigner in Of Hospitality” (Haddad 2021).

References

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Haddad, S. Derrida on Language and Philosophical Education. Stud Philos Educ 40, 149–163 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-020-09739-4

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