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Notes
E.g., his studies on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, and Spinoza.
Cf. also Ford’s earlier publications on Lyotard, such as Ford (2015).
Although, as Joris Vlieghe, writer of the book’s epilogue, also observes, these aspects of infancy are not unrelated to its ontological radicality (Ibid., 75).
The greater part of Vlieghe’s epilogue can be seen as a reading of Ford’s book through the lens of the issues of anthropocentrism and (post)humanism (see especially: Ibid., 78–81).
Transcendental empiricism and virtuality are of course Deleuzian terms (cf. Deleuze, 2004). The same status might be said to apply to ‘the’ system as infancy’s counterpart.
See also the passages where Ford retakes Lyotard’s reading of Kant’s aesthetics, and contrasts the normative notion of sensus communis (and the concord of faculties typical of the beautiful) with the ‘dissensual’ abnormality of the sublime (Ford 2021, 38–39ff.).
Interestingly, Ford shows that Lyotard even held critique to be one of these public ploys (Ibid., 8).
Cf. Lyotard’s tendency, despite Ford’s insistence to the contrary, to a kind of negative-theological ‘mysticism’ (in terms of “the ineffable”, “the opaque”, “silence”; cf. Ibid., 18, 39, 56).
Cf. Ibid., 64. Here Ford refers to the work of music theorist Nina Sun Eidsheim, yet without even mentioning the often very practical (and outright educational) suggestions she integrates in her theoretical analyses (Eidsheim, 2015).
It seems symptomatic that Ford pays little deep-going attention to Berio’s idiosyncratic use of ‘extended technique’ in his Sequenza compositions: is it after all not so that music’s mutic, timbral mystery can only reveal itself within practical and discursive processes that are always—technically—mediated? (cf. Ford 2021, 46).
It is in this way that Michel Serres conceives of education as parasitically living off a series of host systems, as both an excluded and included third (Serres 1997).
Which is the claim of Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, in their (outspokenly non-conformist) “defense of the school” (Masschelein and Simons 2013).
To which on occasion Lyotard also refers, most curiously in his The postmodern explained, which in the original French is titled Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (the postmodern explained to children) (Lyotard 1988, 30–32).
For a more elaborate discussion of this notion in Deleuze, see Bogue (2004).
Deleuze refers to the French apprendre (“learning”) as a circular dynamic of ‘capture’ (ap-prendre): a character is captured by a sign inasmuch as it captures its situation through this sign (Deleuze 2000, 54–56).
Which has in fact been tried, and led some to believe that Vinteuil stood for the composer Gabriel Pierné.
As partly opposed to Ford’s own Lyotardian concepts of “idiocy” and “stupor” (Ford 2021, 30–31; 66–67).
Cf. Joris Vlieghe’s remarks on the work of Yves Citton (Ibid., p. 80–81).
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Koopal, W. Derek Ford’s Inhuman Educations. Stud Philos Educ 40, 535–543 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09794-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09794-5