ABSTRACT
Within the interpretative impetus of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida has addressed the question of the ethics of teaching and the difference of the Other. The focus of deconstruction has been directed toward questions of academic responsibility and the institution of education as elucidated by the problems of negotiating the affectivity of Western epistemology in the pedagogical mode of theory as praxis. Specifically, Derrida’s engagement with the ethics of education is linked to his re-examination of the philosophical history of writing and the semiological underpinnings of the metaphysical model of cognition. The breaking down of this model of meaning making and its teachings is quite arguably the reason for the seminal text of deconstruction, Of Grammatology. This chapter shows how the recognition of an ethnocentric prioritization of speech over writing is possible when the representationality of language is understood in terms of an economy of signification. The point is that deconstruction – and the radicality of its complication of the Occidental fable of pure origins – would not have been possible without the theoretical presuppositions of the teleological intimations of either semiological auto-affection or phenomenological transcendentalism.
