Abstract
During the last two decades Jacques Derrida has made a number of important and crucial interventions regarding the relationship between democracy and the purpose and meaning of higher education. Democracy, for Derrida, is not merely a social—historical creation, but also contains a promise of what is to come. And it is precisely in the tension between the dream and the reality of democracy that a space of agency, critique, and education opens up, which signals both the normative and political character of democracy. But, as Derrida is well aware, democracy also demands a pedagogical intervention organized around the need to create the conditions for educating citizens who have the knowledge and skills to participate in public life, question institutional authority, and engage the contradiction between the reality and promise of democracy. Pedagogy, in this sense, is central to democracy because it represents an essential dimension of justice, offering the conditions necessary for individuals to become autonomous in order to make choices, participate in and shape public life, and develop a socially committed notion of justice.
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Notes
Zygmunt Bauman (2002). Society under Siege (Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 170.
Jacques Derrida (2001). “The future of the profession or the unconditional university,” inLaurenceSimmons andHeatherWorth (eds)DerridaDownunder (Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmore Press), p. 233.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1997). “Democracy as procedure and democracy as regime.” Constellations, 4: 1, 10.
For some excellent critical commentaries on various aspects of neoliberalism and its consequences, see Noam Chomsky (1999). Profit over People: Neoliberalism and the Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press); Pierre Bourdieu (1998). Acts of Resistance; Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York: The New Press); Pierre Bourdieu et al. (1999). The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press; Robert W. McChesney (1999). Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press); Zygmunt Bauman (1998). Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press); Society under Siege.
Lawrence Grossberg (2001). “Why does neo-liberalism hate kids? The war on youth and the culture of politics.” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 23: 2, 133.
Ibid., 133.
These figures largely come from Children’s Defense Fund, The State of Children in America’s Union: A 2002 Action Guide to Leave No Child Behind (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund Publication, 2002), pp. iv–v, 13.
Bill Moyers (May 30, 2003). “Deep in a black hole of red ink,” Common Dreams News Center. Available on line at http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0530–11.htm
Noreena Hertz (2001). The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (NewYork:The Free Press), p. 11.
Zygmunt Bauman (1999). In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 2.
Naomi Klein (1999). No Logo (New York: Picador), p. 177.
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (2000). “Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming.” PublicCulture, 12: 2 (North Carolina: Duke University Press), pp. 305–306.
Peter Beilharz (2000). Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity (London: Sage), p. 160.
James Traub (November 19, 2000). “This campus is being simulated.” TheNewYorkTimesMagazine, p. 93.
Cited in Roger Simon (2001). “The university: A place to think?,” in Henry A. Giroux and Kostas Myrsiades (eds), Beyond the Corporate University: Culture and Pedagogy in the New Millenium (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 47–48.
Larry Hanley, “Conference roundtable.” Found Object, 10 (spring 2001), 103.
Masao Miyoshi (1998). “‘Globalization,’ culture, and the university,” in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (eds), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 263.
Stanley Aronowitz (March/April 1998) “The new corporate university.” Dollars and Sense, p. 32.
Jacques Derrida (2000). “Intellectual courage: An interview” CultureMachine, 2, 9.
Michael Hanchard (Winter 1999). “Afro-modernity: Temporality, politics, and the African diaspora.” Public Culture, 11: 1, 253.
Ibid., 256.
Jerome Bind (2000). “Toward an ethic of the future.” PublicCulture, 12: 1, 52.
Roger I. Simon (April 1, 2002). “On public time,” Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Unpublished paper, p. 4.
Simon Critchley, “Ethics, politics, and radical democracy-The History of a Disagreement,” Culture Machine, available at http://www.culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/frm_f1.htm
James Rule (Winter 1998). “Markets in their place.” Dissent, 30.
Peter Euben (Summer-Fall, 2000). “Reforming the liberal arts.” The Civic Arts Review, 2, 8.
Cary Nelson (July 2002). “Between anonymity and celebrity: The zero degrees of professional identity” College English, 64:6, 717.
Geoff Sharp (2002). “The idea of the intellectual and after,” in Simon Cooper, John Hinkson, and Geoff Sharp (eds), Scholars and Entrepreneurs (Melbourne, Australia: Arena Publications), p. 280.
Ben Agger (November 4, 2002). “Sociological writing in the wake of postmodernism.” Cultural Studies/Cultural Methodologies, 2:4, 444.
Gary Rhoades (Spring 2001). “Corporate, Techno Challenges, and Academic Space,” Found Object 10, p. 143.
Taken from James Howard Kunstler (1993). The Geography of Nowhere (New York: Touchstone).
Jeffrey L. Williams, “Franchising the university,” in Beyond theCorporateUniversity, p. 23.
Michael A. Peters, “The university in the knowledge economy,” in Scholars and Entrepreneurs, p. 148.
Zygmunt Bauman (1998). Globalization: The Human Consequence (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 81.
Nick Couldry (2001). “Dialogue in an age of enclosure: Exploring the values of cultural studies.” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 23:1, 17.
Arundhati Roy (2001). Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press), p. 6.
The ideas on public intellectuals are taken directly from Edward Said (2001). Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 502–503. For the reference to realist utopias, see Pierre Bourdieu (2000). “For a scholarship with commitment.” Profession, 42.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1997). “Culture in a democratic society,” in David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 343.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1991). “The nature and value of equity,” Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 140.
Cornelius Castoriadis (April 1996). “The problem of democracy today.” Democracy and Nature, 8, 24.
Castoriadis, “The Greek Polis and the creation of democracy,” in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, p. 112.
Christopher Newfield (2003). “Democratic passions: Reconstructing individual agency,” in Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (eds), Materializing Democracy (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 314.
Samin Amin has captured this sentiment in his comment: “Neither modernity nor democracy has reached the end of its potential development. That is why I prefer the term ‘democratization,’ which stresses the dynamic aspect of a still-unfinished process, to the term ‘democracy,’ which reinforces the illusion that we can give a definitive formula for it.” See Samir Amin (June 2001). “Imperialization and globalization.” Monthly Review, 12.
Main Badiou (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London:Verso), p. 96.
Ron Aronson (summer 1999). “Hope after Hope?” Social Research, 66:2, 489.
Roger Simon (April 1987). “Empowerment as a pedagogy ofpossibility.” Language Arts, 64: 4, 371.
Cited in Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (2000). “Changing the subject: Judith Butler’s politics of radical resignification.” JAC, 20:4, 765.
Lawrence Grossberg (1994). “Introduction: Bringing it all back home—pedagogy and cultural studies,” in Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren (eds), Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge), p. 14.
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© 2005 Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A. Peters
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Giroux, H.A. (2005). Higher Education and Democracy’s Promise: Jacques Derrida’s Pedagogy of Uncertainty. In: Trifonas, P.P., Peters, M.A. (eds) Deconstructing Derrida. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980649_5
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