Politics, pedagogy, and the decentred subject, an inquiry into the ethical dimensions of political and educational thought

grantor: University of TorontoThis study investigates the link between ethics and epistemology that the modern educational project came to embody when it was first conceived as a project of Enlightenment. For Kant, education stood as a singular point of intersection between the political possibility of a good or just society, and the philosophical ideal of pure or transcendental reason. The thesis investigates the question of what happens to this normative project--to the ethical grounds 'for' critical educational theory--when the epistemological tenets of Enlightenment thought are read from a deconstructive point of view. I argue that a "decentring" of the transcendental subject inevitably ensues. It follows, however, from a rigorous adherence to the Enlightenment protocols of critique themselves, not from their rejection. In this sense, deconstructive practices of reading reflect neither an abandonment to political nihilism or relativism, nor a celebratory call to uphold difference, otherness, or radical heterogeneity. Insofar as the epistemological crisis of postmodernity issues directly from the philosophical tenets of modernity that are now under dispute, moreover, deconstruction can be seen instead as a radicalization of reason as self-critique. This claim is brought to bear on moral and educational theories that cross the philosophical spectrum. Specifically, the study reveals normative assumptions about the human being and the just society that inform emancipatory educational theories of three philosophical types. In each case, I show that the normative assumptions are both politically necessary and yet impossible to ground epistemologically. Consequently, critical political and educational theories aimed at a determinate good are either exclusionary in nature, or they are theoretically flawed. The study concludes with the argument that the refusal to collapse ' différance' into another kind of "difference" allows us to understand political "critique" better as a quasi-responsible mode of interrogation than as a method for determining what is good. This reformulation of "critique" preserves the force that is unique to a deconstructive mode of analysis--a force that is, in a certain way, the ethical dimension of political and educational thought.Ph.D