ABSTRACT
If justice is the ethical goal of teaching, what does it mean to create a just classroom? In this chapter, we will see how Derrida’s discussion of justice in his essay “Force of Law” offers us an original and powerful answer to this question. It is an answer that owes a lot to the writings of a man whose thought, Derrida has claimed, “can make us tremble” – Emmanuel Levinas (Derrida 1978: 82).1 This chapter will first explain Levinas’s radical perspective on ethics and then, through an examination of the ways in which the two men’s thoughts diverge, explain Derrida’s development of these Levinasian themes to explain Derrida’s understanding of ethical teaching.
