Levinas, Subjectivity, Education E-Book

Anna Strhan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 546

Beschreibung

Levinas, Subjectivity, Education explores how the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas lead us to reassess education and reveals the possibilities of a radical new understanding of ethical and political responsibility. * Presents an original theoretical interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas that outlines the political significance of his work for contemporary debates on education * Offers a clear analysis of Levinas's central philosophical concepts, including the place of religion in his work, demonstrating their relevance for educational theorists * Examines Alain Badiou's critique of Levinas's work * Considers the practical implications of Levinas' theories for concrete educational practices and frameworks

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

LEVINAS: PHILOSOPHER, TEACHER, PROPHET

LEVINAS AND THE INFINITE DEMANDS OF EDUCATION

Part I Levinas’s Teaching

1 Teaching, Subjectivity and Language in Totality and Infinity

DISCOURSE AS TEACHING

SUBJECTIVITY AS ETHICAL

ELECTION TO SUBJECTIVITY – A TEACHING

SOME POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS

THE POSSIBILITY OF ETHICAL SUBJECTIVITY

2 The Infinite Responsibility of the Ethical Subject in Otherwise than Being

THE SAYING AND THE SAID

SUBJECTIVITY AS SENSIBILITY

ETHICS OF DIFFERENCE OR AN ETHICS OF TRUTHS?

READING LEVINAS WITH BADIOU: IMPOSSIBLY DEMANDING?

AN IMPOSSIBLY DEMANDING EDUCATION

Part II Towards an Education Otherwise

3 Heteronomy, Autonomy and the Aims of Education

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AUTONOMY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

QUESTIONING AUTONOMY

HETERONOMY BEFORE AUTONOMY: LEVINAS AND THE KANTIAN TRADITION

EDUCATING FOR HETERONOMY?

THE IDEAL OF AUTONOMY RESTATED

4 Grace, Truth and Economiesof Education

WEAVING NEW FABRIC OUT OF A RIPPED YARN

THE ECONOMY OF EXCHANGE AND THE MARKETIZATION AND CUSTOMERIZATIONOF EDUCATION

THE RULE OF THE MARKET UNDER ATTACK

IS EDUCATION POSSIBLE IN SCHOOLS?

Part III ‘Concrete Problems with Spiritual Repercussions’

5 Towards a Religious Education Otherwise

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION IN BRITAIN TODAY: A SNAPSHOT

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

THE CRITICAL REALIST MODEL

PRIVILEGING JUDGEMENTAL RATIONALITY

A RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OTHERWISE?

6 Dialogue, Proximity and the Possibility of Community

A COMMON WORD BETWEEN US AND YOU

LOVE OF THE NEIGHBOUR IN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

THE NEIGHBOUR

JUSTICE, SOCIETY, THE THIRD AND FRATERNITY

DIALOGUE BETWEEN NEIGHBOURS AND STRANGERS

EDUCATION AND THE MEANING OF COMMUNITY

7 Political Disappointment, Hope and the Anarchic Ethical Subject

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL DISAPPOINTMENT

EDUCATION, DISAPPOINTMENT, HOPE

AN-ARCHISM, LEVINAS AND ETHICAL PROTEST

LEVINAS AND BADIOU: TOWARDS A PRESENT HOPE

Coda

Bibliography

Index

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.

Titles in the series include:

Philosophy for Children in Transition:Problems and ProspectsEdited by Nancy Vansieleghem and David KennedyReading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics and the Aims of EducationEdited by Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher MartinThe Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional PracticeChris HigginsThe Formation of ReasonDavid BakhurstWhat do Philosophers of Education do? (And how do they do it?)Edited by Claudia RuitenbergEvidence-Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers and Richard SmithNew Philosophies of LearningEdited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew DavisThe Common School and the Comprehensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary EssaysEdited by Mark Halstead and Graham HaydonPhilosophy, Methodology and Educational ResearchEdited by David Bridges and Richard D. SmithPhilosophy of the TeacherBy Nigel TubbsConformism and Critique in Liberal SocietyEdited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher WinchRetrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist AgeBy Michael BonnettEducation and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and LearningEdited by Joseph Dunne and Pádraig HoganEducating Humanity: Bildung in PostmodernityEdited by Lars Lovlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik NordenboThe Ethics of Educational ResearchEdited by Michael Mcnamee and DavidBridgesIn Defence of High CultureEdited by John Gingell and Ed BrandonEnquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On-Line EducationEdited by Paul Standish and Nigel BlakeThe Limits of Educational AssessmentEdited by Andrew DavisIllusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the MarketEdited by Ruth JonathanQuality and EducationEdited by Christopher Winch

This edition first published 2012© 2012 Anna Strhan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strhan, Anna.Levinas, subjectivity, education : towards an ethics of radical responsibility / Anna Strhan.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-31239-1 (pbk.)1. Levinas, Emmanuel. 2. Education–Philosophy. 3. Education–Moral and ethical aspects.4. Subjectivity.LB880.L472S77 2012370.1–dc23

2012002574

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Paul Klee, Castle and Sun, 1928. Oil on canvas, 54 x 62 cm. London, Collection Ronald Penrose. Photo akg-images / Erich Lessing

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Preface

Over the past two decades the importance of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas for educational and social research has come to be recognized more widely. His name has become associated with the recent emphasis on intersubjectivity and multiculturalism, and to some extent with the understanding of the teacher-student relationship at the heart of education itself. In all of these there has been a new affirmation of themes of alterity, of the relation to the other. But Levinas is in more than one sense still late on this scene: he is in some degree a late starter, much of his major work not being written until the later decades of a long life; and it is the name of Jacques Derrida, some quarter of a century younger and associated with these same themes, that is the more familiar. There is some irony in this, especially to the extent that Derrida’s work is scarcely imaginable without the background influence of Levinas.

Yet, notwithstanding the appearance of such valuable contributions to the field as Sharon Todd’s Learning from the Other Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education (2003, SUNY) and Denise Egéa-Kuehne’s collection Levinas and Education: At the Intersection of Faith and Reason (2008, Taylor and Francis), the work of Levinas, as of Derrida also, tends to be referred to rather than read, and there is more than a little distortion of his central ideas. Thus, for example, the idea of the relation to the other has been received in a context where there is often a preoccupation with multiculturalism. The now familiar phrase ‘radical alterity’ and the (capitalized) ‘Other’ owe something not exactly to the legacy of Levinas but to English translations of signal terms in his texts, and they connote ideas that have now been appropriated to different concerns – say, to a politics of recognition. Such familiarization, then, has become an obstacle. The absolute difference that, on Levinas’s account, structures human relationships, and a fortiori everything else, is not to be understood in terms of the registering of the distinctive features or characteristics of the other. The familiar echo of this central Levinasian idea is then a distortion, whose relatively sonorous reverberations themselves obscure his concerns: by turning attention towards differences between cultures, which take the form of particular characteristics, they obscure the absolute and structurally primordial nature of the relation to the other human being. Their adoption and adaptation of this language makes it all the more difficult to understand the nature and profundity of Levinas’s insight – which remains late and still to be received.

If, in the present text, Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility, Anna Strhan had done nothing more than to overcome such obstacles, that would be reason enough to welcome its publication. But in fact she has done so much more. While it is beyond the scope of a brief preface to register adequately the singularity of her achievement, let me highlight for the reader some of the book’s most salient features.

Here, then, one finds, in Part I, an exposition, structured around Levinas’s two masterworks, of the multiple perspectives though which he reveals the primordial relation to the other as involving a non-reciprocal responsibility. In my relation to the other, I am addressed, and this is the basis for everything else. These are weighty matters, no doubt. But Strhan’s writing is sensitive to Levinas’s avoidance of the intellectualizing of this as a theme: it is to be revealed instead through attentiveness to everyday language, to the affective interruptions to which the subject is prone, and with intersubjectivity realized not in abstract terms but rather as lived immediacy. In the light of this, and early in the book, the elegant clarity of her writing establishes a style that is at once moving and restrained, and entirely free from that modishness that often hampers exegeses of poststructuralist thought. It does this in part through a phenomenological attentiveness in which the vivid exploration of examples plays an important role.

In Part II, there is a turn more directly to education. This enables Strhan not only to elaborate on the manner in which the very idea of teaching is built into the primordial relation to the other, hence casting light retrospectively on the educational importance of Part I: it also demonstrates the cogency of Levinas’s position in relation to more specific ideas that are currently of great prominence in education. In this the extended discussion of autonomy is of particular pertinence. Far from showing Levinas to be simply ‘against’ the idea, Strhan’s account reveals autonomy’s internal relation to heteronomy, a visceral exposure to the other on which my autonomy depends. Hence, this more searching examination of the nature of subjectivity lays the way for an affirmation of autonomy that is ultimately more robust.

The focus becomes more precise in Part III, which includes an extended discussion of the specific place of religious education in the curriculum. The discussion is clearly located within an appreciation of the pressures and the possibilities of culturally diverse societies, and, while it details some of the controversies that currently beset religious education in particular policy contexts, especially in the UK, it moves towards a more far-reaching account of the significance of religion in the understanding of education. This is scarcely separable from notions of community, citizenship and the political, and it is indeed in relation to these themes that the argument subsequently unfolds.

The book succeeds not only in explaining but also in demonstrating the extent to which teachers and students are always already ethical and political subjects. It shows how our sense of our subjectivity as beginning in responsibility deepens the more we answer to it. It is through this that education and indeed knowledge and truth themselves are possible. The patent sincerity of the writing, the quality of its address to the reader, should leave no one in doubt that this is much more than a scholarly exercise. Anna Strhan has brought to this study practical experience as a teacher of religious education, scholarship of remarkable depth and breadth, and a commitment to the educative possibilities of Levinas’s philosophy that will inspire some and challenge others, but that should provoke all to think more. The series is grateful to her for contributing this outstanding volume.

Paul Standish

Acknowledgements

The themes of ‘grace’ and ‘teaching’ are central ideas in this book. As I reflect on those who have taught me many things in many ways as I wrote this text, I feel extremely grateful for all the encounters and conversations, with colleagues, friends, students and others, that have helped shape the development of this work. The Philosophy of Education section of the Institute of Education provided a welcoming and stimulating environment to pursue this research, in particular, the opportunity for ongoing discussions offered by the weekly departmental research seminar. My supervisor, Paul Standish, contributed incalculably to the completion of this book. I thank him for his intellectual and personal generosity, friendship, and the care and attention he has consistently shown in helping me to articulate and re-articulate my readings of Levinas within education. I am grateful to those who have read and commented on one or more chapters in earlier forms for their careful readings and comments, including Jan Derry, Michael Bonnett, Judith Suissa and Terence McLaughlin. Sharon Todd and Howard Caygill examined my doctoral thesis, and I am especially thankful for the opportunity of engaging with their stimulating questions, comments and interpretations of my reading of Levinas.

Portions of this book have been presented in draft form at various seminars, colloquia and conferences, and I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to share my work in this way. I am particularly grateful for engaging discussions with members of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, the University of Kyoto, K. U. Leuven and the Centre for Theology, Religions and Culture at King’s College, London. The Religious Studies department of the school where I was teaching for much of the writing of this book was supportive and encouraging throughout, and my students kept my research grounded in the everyday concrete demands I have sought to address. My parents, Petra and Lou Strhan, and my grandmother Lorna Houseman, have, from the very beginning, always been interested in and enthusiastic about my ongoing studies, and I feel very fortunate for that. Martin Block has given me unfailing encouragement, comfort and support throughout: I have more reasons for thanking him for the ways he has contributed to this book than I can possibly enumerate.

At Wiley-Blackwell, I want to thank Jacqueline Scott and Isobel Bainton for all their help and encouragement in producing this volume. In the final preparation of this text, I very much appreciate the assistance provided by Shikha Pahuja, for overseeing the production of this book, Rosalind Wall, for copy-editing.

Material from several chapters has been published elsewhere, and is reused here with permission. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as ‘Bringing Me More Than I Contain…: Discourse, Subjectivity and the Scene of Teaching’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 41: 3 (2007), pp. 411-30, and the revised version here also contains sections from ‘Religious Language as Poetry: Heidegger’s Challenge’, The Heythrop Journal, 52: 6 (2011), pp. 926-38. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in ‘The Obliteration of Truth by Management: Badiou, St Paul and the Question of Economic Managerialism in Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42: 2 (2010), 230–50. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published as ‘A Religious Education Otherwise? An Examination and Proposed Interruption of current British Practice’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 44: 1 (2010), 23–44. Sections from Chapter 6 were published in ‘And who is my Neighbour? Levinas and the Commandment to Love Re-examined’, Studies in Interreligious Dialogue, 19: 2 (2009), 145–66. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of these articles for their comments.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

Excerpts from Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity, A. Lingis, trans. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Reproduced by permission of Duquesne University Press.

Excerpts from Levinas, E. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism.

© 1990 The Athlone Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press (US, its dependencies and Canada) and by kind permission of Continuum International Publishing Group, a Bloomsbury company (world excluding US and US dependencies).

Excerpts from Levinas, E. (1981) Otherwise than Being, A. Lingis, trans. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Copyright 1981, 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers B.V. reproduced by kind permission Springer Science + Business Media B.V.

Excerpts from Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, P. Hallward, trans. (London and New York, Verso) reproduced by permission of Verso.

Excerpts from Saint Paul, The Foundation of Universalism by Alain Badiou, translated by Ray Brassier Copyright © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr University for the English translation; All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org, and by Presses Universitaire de France.

AQA material is reproduced by permission of the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.

Questions from OCR Specimen Paper 2003 Religious Studies (A). Code 2301/1 are reproduced by permission of OCR Examinations.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

List of Abbreviations

Works by Levinas

BV

Beyond the Verse

BW

Basic Philosophical Writings

CP

Collected Philosophical Papers

DEH

Discovering Existence with Husserl

DF

Difficult Freedom

EE

Existence and Existents

GDT

God, Death, and Time

GM

Of God Who Comes To Mind

LR

The Levinas Reader

OB

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence

OE

On Escape

OS

Outside the Subject

RB

Is It Righteous To Be?

RPH

Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism

THP

The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology

TI

Totality and Infinity

TN

In the Time of Nations

TR

Nine Talmudic Readings

Works by Badiou

BE

Being and Event

E

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

HI

Handbook of Inaesthetics

M

Metapolitics

SP

Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

Introduction

Here you have, in administrative and pedagogical problems, invitations to a deepening, to a becoming conscience, that is, to Scripture.

(RB, p. 39)

On 6 January 2006, the French newspaper Le Monde, responding to the centennial celebrations of Emmanuel Levinas’s birth, published an article entitled, ‘Generation Levinas?’ (Lévy, 2006). This question, as Seán Hand notes in his introduction to Levinas’s work, together with the astonishing thirty-two conferences honouring his work held in five continents that year, confirms the explosion of interest in Levinas (Hand, 2009, p. 109). Having risen from relative obscurity to being widely seen as a key figure in an important shift in the trajectory of Western philosophy, the influence of the Lithuanian-born philosopher has now extended far beyond professional philosophy to permeate literary, legal and critical theory, theology, religious studies, aesthetics, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and human rights theory. The continuing spread of that influence testifies to the truth of Jacques Derrida’s claim, made at Levinas’s funeral, that the work of Levinas is ‘so large one can no longer glimpse its edges’ (Derrida, 1999, p. 3). In that speech, Derrida stated that it was impossible – and he would not even try – ‘to measure in a few words the œuvre of Emmanuel Levinas’, and he talked of the importance of learning from Levinas in this task:

One would have to begin by learning once again from him and from Totality and Infinity, for example, how to think what an ‘œuvre’ or ‘work’ – as well as fecundity – might be. One can predict with confidence that centuries of readings will set this as their task. We already see innumerable signs, well beyond France and Europe… that the reverberations of this thought will have changed the course of philosophical reflection in our time, and of our reflection on philosophy, on what orders it according to ethics, according to another thought of ethics, responsibility, justice, the State, etc., according to another thought of the other, a thought that is newer than so many novelties because it is ordered according to the absolute anteriority of the face of the Other.

    Yes, ethics before and beyond ontology (Derrida, 1999, pp. 3–4).

As the influence of Levinas’s work extends through an increasing variety of disciplines, it is not surprising that over the last decade, we have seen a number of studies of Levinas in relation to education (e.g. Todd, 2003a; Biesta, 2006; Egéa-Kuehne, 2008). It is fair to say, however, that many educational theorists are suspicious that this interest in Levinas is attributable to his being currently in vogue, and that present prominence of his work may be a passing trend. The obsessive quality of his uncompromising writing remains opaque, or at least counter-intuitive, to many working within education. Yet the concerns of Levinas’s philosophy are of obvious relevance for how we think about education on all levels. In her introduction to Levinas and Education, Denise Egéa-Kuehne emphasizes that his central concepts of ethics, justice, consciousness, responsibility and conscience, developed through the encounter with the other and intersubjective relation are ‘notions which rest at the very heart of education’ (Egéa-Kuehne, 2008, p. 1).

The central concern of this book is to think through how Levinas’s theories of subjectivity and teaching lead us to reconsider the very nature of education, what and who education is for, and how his thinking disturbs the intellectual closure represented by some dominant frameworks of educational discourse and practice, leading to a radical understanding of ethical and political responsibility. Before turning to this, let me first outline the historical context of Levinas’s philosophy and how that related to his own work within education.

LEVINAS: PHILOSOPHER, TEACHER, PROPHET

It was as if, to use the language of tourists, I went to see Husserl and I found Heidegger. Of course, I will never forget Heidegger’s relation to Hitler. Even if this relation was only of a very short duration, it will be forever. But the works of Heidegger, the way in which he practised phenomenology in Being and Time – I knew immediately that this was one of the greatest philosophers in history. (RB, p. 32)

It was while studying at Strasbourg that Levinas read Husserl’s Logical Investigations for the first time, an experience that gave him the sense of ‘gaining access not to yet another speculative construction, but to a new possibility of thinking, to a new possibility of moving from one idea to another, different from deduction, induction, and dialectic, a new way of unfolding “concepts”’ (p. 31).1 Inspired by this sense of a new direction in philosophy, Levinas went to Freiburg to study with Husserl himself in 1928–29, writing his thesis on Husserl’s theory of intuition. Yet the approach he had discovered in Husserl was, as he put it, ‘continued and transfigured by Heidegger’ (p. 32). While Levinas was credited with introducing Husserlian phenomenology into France through his doctoral thesis and translation of Cartesian Meditations, he came to critique his former teacher from a ‘historical’ perspective, informed by his engagement with Heidegger, for excessive theoreticism and ‘overlooking the existential density and historical embeddedness of lived experience’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 7). Much inspired by Heidegger, Levinas describes his approach, towards the end of Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, as ‘post-Husserlian’ (THP, p. 130). In these early phenomenological writings, we can also see the beginnings of Levinas’s own distinctive later position, when he states that the Husserlian reduction to an ego ‘can only be a first step towards phenomenology. We must also discover “others” and the intersubjective world’ (p. 150). Yet in Otherwise than Being, Levinas will still describe his work as ‘in the spirit of Husserlian philosophy’, an approach he explains as follows:

Our presentation of notions proceeds neither by their logical decomposition, nor by their dialectical description. It remains faithful to intentional analysis, insofar as it signifies the locating of notions in the horizon of their appearing, a horizon unrecognized, forgotten or displaced in the exhibition of an object, in its notion, in the look absorbed by the notion alone. (OB, p. 183)

Therefore, while influenced by Heidegger’s emphasis that phenomenological analysis should begin in the facticity of the human in the everyday situation, Levinas nevertheless retained in his later writings a sense of his work’s debt to Husserl, albeit moving away from his former teacher to the extent that it can be questioned whether his work can really be seen as remaining within phenomenology. If the intentionality thesis, which sees every mental phenomenon as directed towards its object, is axiomatic within phenomenology, then, as Simon Critchley suggests, ‘Levinas’s big idea about the relation to the other person is not phenomenological, because the other is not given as a matter for thought or reflection… Levinas maintains a methodological but not a substantive commitment to Husserlian phenomenology’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 8).

This Husserlian phenomenological method was, Levinas argued, transformed by Heidegger. It was, he later stated, the brilliance of Heidegger’s application of the phenomenological approach, rather than ‘the last speculative consequences of his project’ that remained with him (RB, p. 33). Levinas followed Heidegger in rejecting Husserl as too theoretical, too removed from the everyday, stating:

Husserl conceives philosophy as a universally valid science in the manner of geometry and the sciences of nature, as a science which is developed through the efforts of generations of scientists, each continuing the work of the others… In this conception, philosophy seems as independent of the historical situation of man as any theory that tries to consider everything sub specie aeternitatis… [The historical] structure of consciousness, which occupies a very important place in the thought of someone like Heidegger… has not been studied by Husserl, at least in the works published so far. He never discusses the relation between the historicity of consciousness and its intentionality, its personality, its social character. (THP, pp. 155–6)

In the concluding section of Theory of Intuition, we can see how far his critique of Husserl emerged from his engagement with Heidegger when he describes Heidegger’s phenomenological method as following Husserl, ‘in a profoundly original manner, and we feel justified in being inspired by him’ (p. 155).

Levinas admired how Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology disrupted the primacy of consciousness in Husserl’s approach. While Husserl’s transcendental Ego analyses life from a transcendent, ahistorical position, Heidegger’s analysis saw Being and beings as always already engaged in time and history, without any recourse to the absolute self-liberation offered by Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. For Heidegger, the phenomenon of meaning takes place always already within time and history. Levinas contrasts their positions:

In Husserl, the phenomenon of meaning has never been determined by history. Time and consciousness remain in the final analysis the ‘passive synthesis’ of an inner, deep constitution that is no longer a being. For Heidegger, on the contrary, meaning is conditioned by something that already was. The intimate link between meaning and thought results from the accomplishment of meaning in history, that something extra that is one’s existence. The introduction of history at the foundation of mental life undermines clarity and constitution as the mind’s authentic modes of existence. Self-evidence is no longer the fundamental mode of intellection. (DEH, p. 87)

This idea of meaning as determined ‘by something that already was’, which Levinas will link to the trace of an immemorial past, becomes fundamental to the conception of language and subjectivity developed in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being.

Levinas’s fascination with Heidegger was brought to an abrupt end by his teacher’s commitment to National Socialism, accepting the position of Rector of Freiburg University in 1933. It is necessary to emphasize that it was precisely because of the extent to which Levinas had been attracted to Heidegger2 that it is possible to see the rest of his philosophical work as an attempt to think through ‘the question of how a philosopher as undeniably brilliant as Heidegger could have become a Nazi, for however short a time’ (Critchley, 2002, p. 8). When asked how he accounted for Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, Levinas appears at a loss to be able to offer an explanation:

I don’t know; it’s the blackest of my thoughts about Heidegger and no forgetting is possible. Maybe Heidegger had the feeling of a world that was decomposing, but he believed in Hitler for a moment in any case. How is this possible? To read Löwith’s memoirs, it was a long moment. (RB, p. 36)

Therefore, although Levinas’s work was inspired by the brilliance of Heidegger, Heidegger’s involvement with Hitlerism must be seen as equally determinative for the future direction Levinas’s work took, governed by ‘the profound desire to leave the climate of that philosophy, and by a conviction that we cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian’ (EE, p. 4). It was, as Howard Caygill notes in Levinas and the Political, the experience of National Socialism, both feared and mourned, which was to determine the course of Levinas’s subsequent philosophical reflection (Caygill, 2002, p. 5). Levinas describes his life in the autobiographical sketch in Difficult Freedom as a ‘disparate inventory… dominated by the presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror’ (DF, p. 291). Both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being should be seen, as Caygill suggests, as philosophical works of mourning, testified to in the dedication of Otherwise than Being, in ‘memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism’. This included most members of his family, who were shot by the Nazis during the pogroms beginning in June 1940, with the collaboration of Lithuanian nationalists. The names of these members of his family who were murdered are included in the dedication of Otherwise than Being.3

This urgency of leaving ‘the climate of [Heidegger’s] philosophy’ is evident in Levinas’s presentiments as well as his mourning of the Nazi horror, and we see this departure from Heidegger developing throughout Levinas’s writings after 1933. On Escape, Levinas’s first original thematic essay of 1935, demonstrates his initial attempt to distance himself from Heideggerian ontology. Here the relation to Being, and by implication to Heidegger’s ontology, is seen as oppressive, a restrictive bond with the I chained to itself. In this text, we see Levinas’s ‘presentiment’ of the political horror that was shortly to follow, in his damning comment evoking Heidegger that ‘Every civilization that accepts being – with the tragic despair it contains and the crimes it justifies – merits the name “barbarian”’ (OE, p. 73). This same prescience is also present in the article ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, published in the Catholic journal Esprit in 1934. Although Heidegger is not mentioned by name, in the preface Levinas wrote when the article was translated into English in 1990, Heideggerian ontology is explicitly seen as allowing National Socialism to occur. Levinas states that the article arose:

from the conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself. This possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being – a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, ‘dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht’. (RPH, p. 63)

This theme, that the self-positing, autarchic subject, a being concerned with being, ‘the famous subject of a transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free’ (RPH p. 63), leads to the possibility of ‘bloody barbarism’ is the kernel of much of what Levinas will later say. In the same article, Levinas also criticizes liberalism as insufficient for protecting the dignity of the human subject, because it likewise depends on a self-positing, autonomous subject. He questions whether liberalism ‘is all we need’ in order to ‘achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject. Does the subject arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other man in the act of election that raises him up to this height?’ (RPH p. 63). Thus we see that already in 1934, Levinas’s philosophical approach is leaving the climate of Heidegger, a departure signalling that Levinas’s rejection of the philosophical primacy of ontology is always already political.

Existence and Existents was published in 1947, the core sections of which Levinas had written while imprisoned as a forced labourer in Stalag XIB from 1940–45. In this, Levinas begins to develop a philosophical course away from existence, towards the idea of the subject as for-the-other. Here Levinas introduces the notion of the il y a, the idea of pure unceasing being, ‘a monotony deprived of meaning’ (RB, p. 45). But following the descriptions of the horror of the il y a, Levinas describes the possibility of leaving this meaninglessness in: ‘obligation, in the “for-the-other”, which introduces meaning into the non-sense of the there is. The I subordinated to the other. In the ethical event, someone appears who is the subject par excellence’ (pp. 45–6). This theme, he states, was ‘the kernel’ of all his later philosophy (pp. 45–6).

Time and The Other, a collection of four lectures delivered at the Philosophical College in Paris and published in 1948, represents the hope for a different approach to philosophy in the post-war period, focusing on alterity and the possibility of a non-reciprocal relation with the other. It can be seen as signalling a link between Levinas’s early phenomenological texts and the first of his two most significant texts: Totality and Infinity. Seán Hand describes this transitional sense of Time and The Other clearly:

It retains from his early phenomenology the fundamentally moral nature of singularity, and brings this now resolutely into a vision of the future that escapes the finite concepts of freedom, forceful inquiry and mastery. Henceforth, the intellectual tendency towards totality will be resisted by the ethical recognition of infinity. It is this fundamental re-founding of phenomenology that Levinas’s first major work of philosophy… will now work to confirm. (Hand, 2009, p. 34)

The first of Levinas’s two major philosophical texts, what Derrida calls ‘the great work’, was Totality and Infinity, originally published in 1961. The emphasis that most commentators place on the conjunction of the terms ‘totality’ and ‘infinity’ in the title is on the contrast between the totalizing approach of ontology and the infinitude of the ethical relation. In this work, Levinas claims that if the relation to the other is conceived of in terms of comprehension, reciprocity, equality, recognition or correlation, then that relation, insofar as it brings that other within the sphere of my understanding, is totalizing. Although Levinas appears to use the term ‘totality’ primarily to characterize the approach he describes as dominating Western philosophy, there is a certain equivocation about the use of the term that allows it also to convey broader political resonances. Caygill notes that the term was broad enough to carry the specific political critique of National Socialism and the general critique of Western philosophy:

‘Totality’ was at once the specific term identified by Victor Klemperer, the philologist of the language of the Third Reich as ‘one of the keystones’ of ‘everyday Nazi discourse’ as well as, and perhaps not coincidentally, one of the central concepts of modern philosophy, featuring significantly in the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. (Caygill, 2002, p. 94)

We have seen how Levinas’s texts prior to Totality and Infinity had already been preoccupied with a critique of Heideggerian ontology. In Totality and Infinity, this critique that began with Heidegger moves beyond him to the philosophical tradition that allowed his thinking to develop and led to the totalitarianism of National Socialism. Given the influence of Heidegger’s own historicist approach to phenomenology, this seems an appropriate way for Levinas to deepen his understanding of how the philosophical positions of his former teacher that allowed ‘political horror’ emerged within the history of a particular philosophical tradition of reflecting on the human subject. The totalizing approach, towards which Levinas argues philosophy has tended, is disrupted by the approach of ‘the Other’,4 addressing me and making me responsible. The demand addressed by the Other is prior to the totalizing relation, leading to Levinas’s famous claim that ethics is ‘not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy’ (TI, p. 304).

Otherwise than Being, Levinas’s second major work, was published in 1974, although sections of it are based on lectures and articles from up to seven years prior to this. This text extends and deepens the presentation of the ethical subject in Totality and Infinity, with the infinite demand addressed to the subject intensified to the point of substitution, persecution and trauma. The difficult language of the text corresponds to the criticisms that Derrida raised against Totality and Infinity in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, primarily the question of whether Levinas’s project of moving beyond ontology is doomed because he remains within the language of Heideggerian ontology, Hegel and Husserl (Derrida, 2001, p. 189 ff.). In an interview, Levinas himself summed this up: ‘Derrida… reproached me for my critique of Hegelianism by saying that in order to criticize Hegel, one begins to speak Hegel’s language. That is the basis of his critique’ (Levinas, 1988, p. 179). Most commentators see the difficulty of the textual performance of Otherwise than Being, the dramatic presentation of the intensity of the infinite ethical demand by which subjectivity is constituted, as evidence of how seriously Levinas felt the need to respond to Derrida. Levinas later described how Totality and Infinity was an attempt at systematizing certain modes of experience and knowledge, implying that Derrida’s critique was justified:

The fundamental experience which objective experience itself presupposes is the experience of the Other… In Totality and Infinity, an attempt was made to systematize these experiences by opposing them to a philosophical thought which reduces the Other to the Same and the multiple to the totality, making of autonomy its supreme principle. (DF, p. 294)

Levinas felt that he had moved beyond ontological language with Otherwise than Being, stating, ‘The ontological language which Totality and Infinity still uses in order to exclude the purely psychological significance of the proposed analyses is henceforth avoided’ (p. 295). The title, Otherwise than Being signifies how Levinas saw this book as moving beyond ontology to an ethical language that draws attention to the disturbance of being by sensibility towards the need and demand of my neighbour. I am a subject only as one primordially exposed to my neighbour who addresses me and looks for my response. My being addressed takes place in passivity, but in responding I am already responsible and unique in the response I alone can give to that particular address. Caygill draws attention to how it is possible to understand the language of this text as pointing in the direction of a ‘prophetic politics’. ‘Prophetic’ here has the sense of both an acknowledgement of and a call towards the possibility of a mode of politics and ethics that is vigilant against the totalizing operations of political ontology. To prophesy in such a way is not to theorize, according to Levinas, but to perceive and bear witness to an order prior to thematization, revealed in illeity:

It is in prophecy that the Infinite escapes the objectification of thematization and of dialogue, and signifies as illeity, in the third person…

    An obedience preceding the hearing of the order, the anachronism of inspiration or of prophecy is, for the recuperable time of reminiscence, more paradoxical than the prediction of the future by an oracle. ‘Before they call, I will answer,’ the formula is to be understood literally. But this singular obedience to the order to go, without understanding the order, this obedience prior to all representation, this allegiance before any oath, this responsibility prior to commitment, is precisely the other in the same, inspiration and prophecy, the passing itself of the Infinite. (OB, p. 150)

These ideas of obedience and illeity have deep significance, I will argue, for how we understand responsibility and community in education.

While developing the philosophical themes explored in these texts, Levinas spent most of his professional life as a school administrator and teacher. He became Director of the École Normale Israélite Orientale in 1945,5 and remained in this position until 1979.6 The ENIO was a school established in Paris in 1867 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, to train teachers to work in the Mediterranean, and Levinas describes the institution as working ‘for the emancipation of Jews in those countries where they still did not have the right to citizenship’ (RB, p. 38). Few commentators have alluded to the significance of this pedagogical and administrative work in the development of his philosophy. However, just as it is necessary to understand the context of the emergence of Levinas’s conceptualization of ethics and politics against the background of his own experience of political horror, so it is also necessary to see his statements about the teaching relation, which are usually interpreted as philosophical descriptions in an abstract sense, against the background of most of his career spent working in education. His description of the address of the Other as the scene of teaching, while not an empirical description of the relation between student and teacher, must nevertheless be seen as informed by his experience of the demands of his role as a teacher, and the way in which, while working as a teacher, he was simultaneously a student, engaged, for example, in Talmudic studies with Monsieur Chouchani.7 Therefore when Levinas states that ‘The pupil-teacher relationship… contains all the riches of a meeting with the Messiah’ (DF, p. 85), this cannot be seen as divorced from his description of subjectivity emerging through a relationship in which I am taught, in Totality and Infinity.

Levinas described the importance of his demanding pedagogical and administrative work at the ENIO and how his work made the Jewish ordeal a pressing demand to confront as follows:

Will my life have been spent between the incessant presentiment of Hitlerism and the Hitlerism that refuses itself to any forgetting? Not everything related in my thoughts to the destiny of Judaism, but my activity at the Alliance kept me in contact with the Jewish ordeal, bringing me back to the concrete social and political problems which concerned it everywhere. In Europe, outside of the Mediterranean region of the schools of the Alliance: notably in Poland, where the proximity of a hostile Germany nevertheless reanimated anti-Semitic instincts barely put to sleep. Concrete problems with spiritual repercussions. Facts that are always enormous. Thoughts coming back to ancient and venerable texts, always enigmatic, always disproportionate to the exegeses of a school. Here you have, in administrative and pedagogical problems, invitations to a deepening, to a becoming conscience, that is, to Scripture. (RB, p. 39)

Levinas’s description in this passage of the teacher’s experience of the concrete, practical demands of conscience bears striking similarity to his description of the condition of subjectivity as a deepening responsibility. The ‘ancient and venerable texts’, the Scripture, to which Levinas refers is, in one sense, a reference to religious scriptures, but must also be seen as metonymic for the demand of God that Levinas will describe as the infinitude of the ethical demand that comes to me from outside, ‘bringing me more than I contain’, and remaining beyond understanding. Thus the scene of teaching that Levinas describes, while not an empirical description, is no abstraction and should be seen as relating to this historical context and his experience of concrete social and political problems directing an educational institution while writing both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, and this should inform interpretations of his philosophical presentation of subjectivity. Having outlined the context of Levinas’s writing, let me say something about the focus of this book.

LEVINAS AND THE INFINITE DEMANDS OF EDUCATION

In his systematic treatment of the relationship between philosophy, ethics and politics, Infinitely Demanding, Simon Critchley argues that philosophy does not begin in the experience of wonder, but in the experience of disappointment, ‘the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed’ (Critchley, 2007, p. 1). It is perhaps too much to claim that all philosophy begins in the experience of disappointment. However, much educational philosophy seems to arise from the sense that there is something lacking in current educational practices and discourses, and I would locate this book as having arisen from my own frustrations with limitations of educational frameworks. The context of the pedagogical demands that Levinas speaks of, in particular the pressing sense of the Jewish ordeal, is clearly different from the situation of British teachers in the early twenty-first century. However, this project is driven by the sense that reading Levinas’s description of the nature of teaching and subjectivity brings to light limitations of an educational thinking dominated by neoliberal educational policies that have led to the excessive prominence of economic managerialism and marketization policies in schools in Britain and elsewhere, and reveals how these policies and discourses distort the way we think about the meaning of education itself. Although such policies have been extensively criticized by other educational theorists, it is my contention that a reading of the meaning of education drawing on Levinas’s presentation of subjectivity adds a distinctive voice otherwise lacking in the debate.

Critiques of these dominant policies have tended to come from those working within radical pedagogy, influenced by Marxism and the post-Marxist approaches of Critical Theory, or from those working within the politics of identity, from communitarian approaches, or from liberal humanist traditions. As I will explore through Alain Badiou’s critique of these traditions, there can be a tendency in these approaches likewise either to treat education instrumentally – as the means to a particular ends, such as the creation of a society of flourishing individuals – or to be too particularist in focusing on ameliorating the conditions of certain groups in society. Such critiques therefore offer insufficient resistance against the distortion of the meaning of education that can arise through instrumentalist discourses. Obviously schooling should aim to create flourishing individuals and a fairer society, and where there are injustices against particular groups, these must of course be resisted. But what is needed is space to think about the meaning of education in a way that does not treat it solely as the means to specific ends. Levinas’s philosophy of teaching opens up for us a way of thinking about what it means to be taught that resists the tendency to harness education to ideals of productivity and service delivery.

Critchley argues that there is a motivational deficit at the heart of contemporary liberal democracy, which can lead to either passive nihilism, attempting to retreat from reality in mysticism, contemplation and ‘European Buddhism’, or active nihilism, attempting to destroy the current order of things, exemplified, he argues, in the actions of Al-Qaeda and other forms of revolutionary vanguardism. This, Critchley argues, leads to the necessity of developing an account of ethical subjectivity in response:

What is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating and empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present, an ethics that is able to respond to and resist the political situation in which we find ourselves… [I]f we are going to stand a chance of constructing an ethics that empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics, we require some sort of answer to what I see as the basic question of morality… My polemical contention is that without a plausible account of motivational force, that is, without a conception of the ethical subject, moral reflection is reduced to the empty manipulation of the standard justificatory frameworks: deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. (Critchley, 2007, pp. 8–9)

Whilst I am less willing than Critchley to condemn the institutions of liberal democracy, I agree that what is vital in attempting to resist and respond to disappointment with current educational theories is an account of ethics that ‘empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics’. This, I will argue, must be related to an account of the meaning of education itself, and it is my aim here to show how this is opened up for us by Levinas.

Situating this work within philosophy of education, I hope to demystify elements of Levinas’s philosophy that have seemed opaque and obtuse to educational theorists and offer a distinctive reading of both Levinas’s articulation of the scene of teaching and the relation of language and subjectivity to education in his two major works: Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. An understanding of language that attends to the subjection of the human subject must be seen as going all the way down, deep into the heart of education itself. This has so far been insufficiently explored in relation to Levinas’s significance for education. The social and political climate of the late twentieth century has, as Diane Perpich comments, been ‘marked deeply by a concern with diversity, otherness and difference’ and it is within this climate that Levinas’s philosophy has risen to prominence (Perpich, 2008, p. 2). It is therefore not surprising that much writing on Levinas in relation to education, as in other disciplines, has been concerned with questions of multiculturalism, human rights and social justice. In Chapter 2, I will consider some of the problems potentially raised by interpretations that treat the question of ‘difference’ in Levinas in relation to discourses of pluralism and multiculturalism. My aim here therefore is to take educational readings of Levinas in a different direction, away from this standard reception, focusing instead on the question of what education is, beginning with the question of language, and how this is bound up with an ethics and politics yielding a radical understanding of responsibility.

Levinas emphasizes how language reveals the ethicality of the human subject and the conditions of intersubjectivity:

Should language be thought uniquely as the communication of an idea or as information, and not also – and perhaps above all – as the fact of encountering the other as other, that is to say, already as response to him? Is not the first word bonjour? As simple as bonjour. Bonjour as benediction and my being available for the other man. It doesn’t mean: what a beautiful day. Rather: I wish you peace, I wish you a good day, expression of one who worries for the other. It underlies all the rest of communication, underlies all discourse. (RB, p. 47)

Since the scene of teaching for Levinas takes place in discourse, an understanding of the nature of language must underlie our thinking about education. While Part I of this book examines these relations between teaching, language and subjectivity, Parts II and III take up themes emerging from these – heteronomy, grace, religion, dialogue, hope – and examine how these speak to the concrete demands of educational practice within specific substantive fields. This relation to concrete demands is neither, however, an attempt to instrumentalize his philosophy in the service of education, nor a straightforward ‘application’. Sharon Todd articulates the difficulty of reading Levinas with education, suggesting what is required is a difficult learning in response to this reading: welcoming ‘his words through giving reception to his teaching. To open one’s educational home to the teaching of Levinas means… to disturb it’ (Todd, 2008, p. 182). I have here attempted to read Levinas as Todd suggests, not ‘casting his thoughts into iron-clad principles which provide answers to preestablished problems of teaching and learning’ (Todd, 2008, p. 182), but a reading that follows Levinas’s own suggestion that Talmudic texts ‘expect of a reader freedom, invention and boldness’ (TR, p. 5). Thus my reading has opened my own ‘educational home’, both within educational theory and the political context of my work as a teacher, to the disturbance that follows from giving reception to Levinas’s teaching. As a result of that disturbance, I am conscious of shifts of style as I move between Levinas’s writings and educational theory, but these shifts of tone in my writing can be seen as reflective of how Levinas’s writing is in a very different register from, and interrupts, dominant educational discourses.

In Part I, I articulate a response to the basic question of morality underlying the very possibility of education through describing how Levinas’s philosophy of teaching relates to his theorization of subjectivity. I take as the starting point for my analysis in Chapter 1 Levinas’s description of teaching as the way language and meaning come to me from the Other, ‘bringing me more than I contain’. Todd highlights the importance of this idea:

What is truly extraordinary about his ethics, and consequently what is highly relevant for readers in the field of education, is that this ethical welcoming takes on the characteristics of a pedagogical relation. Levinas describes welcoming the Other as the self’s capacity to learn from the Other as teacher. At the core of his philosophy, then, lies a theory of learning – one that is not so much concerned with how the subject learns content, but with how the subject learns through a specific orientation to the Other. (Todd, 2008, p. 171)

In Chapter 1, I draw particular attention to how Levinas describes the relation between language, discourse, subjectivity and teaching. Of course, many educational theorists, from Dewey and Buber, to Oakeshott, Bahkthin and Freire, have emphasized the idea that the foundation of education is discourse. What I seek to show is the distinctiveness and provocation of Levinas’s view of discourse as the relation with the Other, through which I become a subject in response to an infinite demand. Furthermore, just as it is necessary to attend to the question of subjectivity in reflecting upon the nature of education, so I will argue, a theory of the subject necessitates reflection upon how that subject comes into being through its condition of being taught, a reflection often given insufficient attention in Levinasian scholarship.

In Chapter 2, I consider how Levinas deepens this understanding of ethical subjectivity in his second major work, Otherwise than Being. I attend in particular to the infinitude of responsibility in Levinas’s account, and how I can only come into being through my conditions of sensibility and susceptibility to the need of the vulnerable neighbour who elects me as one uniquely responsible. Chapter 2 also considers Alain Badiou’s critique of Levinas. My reason for this somewhat unusual confrontation of Levinas with the thought of Badiou is because Badiou has criticized Levinas in a searching way from an overtly atheistic position. Hence, this confrontation is a means of testing the cogency of Levinas’s thought and its dependence on a religious framework. Badiou’s philosophical approach and tone interrupt the somewhat obsessive quality of Levinas’s writing and therefore allow us to attend more closely to the distinctive elements of Levinas’s work. It is my contention that reading Badiou together with Levinas extends our thinking about the infinite demand that, for Levinas, is bound up with the emergence of subjectivity. Whilst holding Levinas and Badiou together might seem an impossible task, there is nevertheless in both their philosophies an understanding of subjectivity as constituted in passivity and sensibility, responding to a demand that comes from the outside and exceeds the self, disrupting any understanding of the autarchy or self-sufficiency of the subject. For both, education is the site of grace, and we will see how Levinas’s conceptualization of the an-archy of the subject and Badiou’s understanding of political subjectivity both imply distance from the state, which has implications for our thinking about educational practice. Badiou, like Levinas, worked as a teacher, yet his understanding of education is not confined to the site of educational institutions.

Given the seeming incommensurability of Levinas’s and Badiou’s projects, it may seem somewhat perverse to bring these two thinkers together; it would admittedly be more usual to place Levinas in conversation with Derrida, for example. My reason for preferring to read Levinas’s understanding of subjectivity and teaching through the lens of Badiou’s critique is precisely because Badiou works from such a different philosophical position. The way both Badiou and Levinas lead us to see education as only possible through an excessive demand – which is also a grace – is the more striking because of their differences, and thus serves as a forceful interruption of notions of education that privilege the development of the autonomous individual human subject, equipped and employable with a portfolio of transferable skills.8 In Levinas’s Talmudic readings, there is a sense of the dynamic irresolutions of the plurivocal texts that he is studying, a plurivocity that Levinas himself extends by introducing contemporary politics and philosophy in his own readings. My hope is that the disruptive effect of reading Levinas and Badiou together will likewise point to an irresolution not just in our reading of Levinas, but in the very processes of reading and education.

The second part of the book unfolds how the presentation of subjectivity developed in Part I disturbs our understanding of education in concrete ways, thinking through what the themes developed through this reading of Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being mean within substantive fields of educational discourse. Beginning in Chapter 3, I consider how this presentation of the subject as heteronomous that emerges in this reading deepens our understanding of what has been seen as one of the principle aims of education: autonomy. In direct continuity with the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment, education has been seen as the site in which rationally autonomous, moral subjects are produced. Responding to Levinas’s understanding of the moral subject as, contra Kant, heteronomous rather than autonomous, I consider how it is possible to see autonomy as dependent on a prior condition of heteronomy, and how this leads to a richer conception of this principal aim of education. In Chapter 4, I continue to open my educational home to the challenge following from this understanding of ethical subjectivity through analysing how a further aim of education – the production of potential workers, with a portfolio of assessable and measurable skills – has become dominant within a neoliberal political context. In this chapter, I draw particularly on Badiou’s challenge to such conceptualizations of education. The reason for such an extended focus on Badiou in this chapter is because he provides a detailed analysis of how managerialism has become a prevailing feature of late capitalist societies, which is for historical reasons a less significant feature of Levinas’s writing. Through Badiou, I consider how many of the standard critiques of economic managerialism in education remain within the current state of the situation. This helps us then to see how the understandings of education offered by both Badiou and Levinas offer us a richer vision of how we might think again about the possibilities of education beyond its distortion by policies of managerialism and marketization.