Abstract
Beginning with Tony O'Connor's account of Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship in Crowley and Hegarty, Formless: Ways in and out of Form (2006), this paper argues that the philosophical history of friendship produces a constant return to issues of education and educational institutions. Employing Montaigne’s famous essay on the subject, along with Derrida’s account of friendship’s philosophical and political history, the paper asserts that the only effective defence against the currently dominant techno-scientific and bureaucratic re-structuring of the university system is an assertion (philosophical, political, but also literary) of the bodily metaphorics which found our understandings of disciplines such as Philosophy and Literary Studies. Such a position allows, then, for a timely reassessment of what friendship (between bodies and within bodies) might mean for those of us still working within such disciplinary bodies.
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- 1.
Tony O’Connor, “O Friend, Where Art Thou?: Derridean Deconstruction and Friendship” in Formless: Ways In and Out of Form, ed. Patrick Crowley and Paul Hegarty (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 39–51; here: p. 51.
- 2.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8 vols., ed. Nora Crook, vol. 1, p. 187. The Shakespeare reference is to Richard’s self-image in his first speech, Richard III, I.i. 20–21.
- 3.
“Our souls were yoked together in such unity, and contemplated each other with so ardent affection, and with the same affection revealed each other to each other right down to the entrails, that not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.” Montaigne, “On affectionate relationships” in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 205 – 219; here: p. 213.
- 4.
“There is an essential disparity between youth and age; and the parent or preceptor is perhaps always an old man to the pupil …. Rousseau has endeavoured to surmount this difficulty by the introduction of a fictitious equality. It is unnecessary perhaps to say more of his system upon the present occasion, than that it is a system of incessant hypocrisy and lying.” Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 Vols, Gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993) vol. 5, p. 131.
- 5.
See, for instance, Derrida’s The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago/London: The Chicago University Press, 1996); Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); On Cosmopolitabism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).
- 6.
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Otobiographies : The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,’ Jacques Derrida (ed.), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1985) Hereafter cited as O.
- 7.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004). Hereafter cited as FEI.
- 8.
“Acroama,” “Acroamata”: “1580. from Gk. Anything heard, f. hear. 1. A rhetorical declamation (as opp. to an argument); 2. Anc. Phil. Oral teaching heard only by the initiated; esoteric as opp. to exoteric doctrines. Hence: Acroamatic adj. orally communicated; esoteric; secret.” (OED).
- 9.
Of course, as Derrida makes clear, the addresses or lectures were not published in Nietzsche’s time. Whenever they have subsequently been published they have been so against Nietzsche’s express prohibition.
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Allen, G. (2012). Otogogy, or Friendship, Teaching and the Ear of the Other. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_14
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