ABSTRACT
Ideas drawn from Jacques Derrida concerning the politics of the future are considered in relation to questions concerning education and democracy, asserting a break with commonplace thinking that equates education positively with democratic mode of government. The question concerning democracy is posed through Derrida’s rethinking, a line of argument that forces us to reconsider our fundamental political bearings. The analogy of the apparatuses of education with Agamben’s account of the camp as the ‘matrix and nomos of our time’ is revisited to problematize the conventional (empty) wisdom of the political relevance of education to social improvement and social redemption. Agamben is evoked again in a reminder of the extent that education permeates the contemporary way of life. Pointers are offered to indicate the anti-democratic ontology of education that the book proposes as essential to understanding contemporary politics. Agamben’s ‘impotentiality’ is used to illustrate the divide between the educational ethic and the material being of the educational grid. Without offering any easy, ‘impact’-oriented solution a possible politics of thinking differently is entertained.
