ABSTRACT
The ontopolitics of educational philosophy, as a version of ontotheology, is explored in relation to philosophy, raising the question about the role of philosophy in the politics of knowledge. Various modes of thinking, following the crisis of enlightenment rationality and humanism, are shown to be at odds with the ontotheology that privileges education as salvation and that sustains the project of the salvation of education. Modern and contemporary modes of apocalyptic thinking are explored as having some bearing on education as a dominant force in modernity to be deconstructed and rethought. The role of philosophy in this rethinking is explored through Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of Jacques Derrida: concerning the authority of modern and contemporary, deconstructive modes of thinking that have been used in this book to interrogate the dominant, hegemonic and almost universal understanding of education that prevails in the academic and in the public spheres. Thinking and rethinking are given some credibility in the light of this exploration. The political ontology of science, knowledge and education is revisited in relation to a politics founded, positively, in the necessary nihilism that follows ‘the death of God’ and that gives rise to opportunities for rethinking collective life, or politics.
