ABSTRACT
The reception of Jacques Derrida’s work (Irwin 2010a) in the discipline of the philosophy of education and, more generally, in the fi eld of educational research has become increasingly positive in recent years. Theorists such as Michael Peters (2004b) and Peter Trifonas (2000) have argued persuasively and infl uentially that accusations of nihilism or textualism (Lather 2004) against deconstruction do not hold up and that his philosophical work has much to say concerning issues of ‘power, violence and domination’ (p. 4), in a way not dissimilar to the work of critical theory. At the same time, the main representatives of the latter ideology in educational theory and research, the school of Critical Pedagogy, often express signifi cant suspicion of the emancipatory potential of deconstruction and warn against its employment in educational theory and research (McLaren 1994; Giroux 2000).
