Derrida, Paideia, and the Politics of Pedagogy #1

This post is part of a longer discussion of Derrida, paideia, and the politics of pedagogy, in the context of the university in the 21st century, particularly since 2007/2008, as perceived through the lens of the UK. It follows closely Edward Baring's (2011) chapter on 'Normalization'.

Edward Baring (2011: 88-89) explains that the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) was founded in 1794 with the task of training lycée professors. However, during the 19th century the ENS Rue D’Ulm became an important and powerful institution, earning a prestige far beyond that originally imagined. 

The ENS was reformed in November 1903, when it was linked to the University of Paris. At this point, all ENS teaching posts were abolished. The reform meant that the only permanent teaching staff was a small group of agrege-repetiteurs. As no real teaching was undertaken at the Ecole beyond the agregation seminars, run by the invited professeurs delegues, the students were forced to seek classes elsewhere. 

In the early 1950s, therefore, it was plausible to regard the ENS as a dormitory with a library, Baring comments.

The old aristocracy generally kept their distance from this Revolutionary institution, with its reputation for left-wing politics. The majority of its alumni became schoolteachers and it recruited heavily from the families of this social grouping. Education was, according to the French Ideal, the best possibility of social advancement. Anyone, this ideology insists, could get into the ENS if they were bright enough. For many, the intellectual elitism of the ENS was the necessary correlate of French democracy. 

Thus, Francois Poucet, President of the ENS' Societe des Amis de l’Ecole, suggested in 1946 that as a democracy becomes more democratic it needs to pay more attention to the recruitment of its elites. True equality consists in offering all the same chances to distinguish themselves according to their own merits. This perception recognises the difficulty at the heart of democracy: while it is in principle 'rule by all' of those who belong to the demos, in practice it is rule by a select (or elected) few, the hoi oligoi, the elite who are distinguished from the many, the hoi polloi,  The character of the democracy in question depends crucially on the relationship between the many and the elite. 

Ideological politics seeped into all parts of everyday life in the ENS in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, Baring notes. For example, Michel Serres complained about the ‘terrorism’ of the communist cellule at the ENS. Similarly, Derrida recalled that Stalinism dominated in a tyrannical manner. Those on the non-conformist left felt the overbearing pressure from a dominant communism. 

The two most important types of groups at the ENS revolved around politics and religion, the two largest groups being the communist cellule, the ‘Stals’, and the Catholics, the ‘Talas’. In the late 1940s, the Christians and the communists were not exclusive groups. For example, Louis Althusser made the transition from devout Catholic (Tala) to engaged communist (Stal). Towards the end of the 1940s, the comfortable cohabitation of the Christians and the communists at the ENS became troubled. At the level of the French nation, relations between Church and party were always tense. However, in 1949 all members of the Communist Party were excommunicated by Papal decree. This national split was soon replicated at the local level at the ENS. The crisis caused by the split led to a decline in the Talas, whose members were forced to choose between the political and the spiritual.

Politically, the communists were for the most part unrivalled. It was they who made the deepest impression on the generation who entered the ENS during 1946-1956, and era marked by a strong but generalised anti-Americanism together with an anti-German sentiment. 

When Jacques Derrida entered the ENS in 1952, the two main social groupings mapped directly onto the twin poles of French philosophy. Both Catholicism and communism offered an explanation of the sufferings of the Second World War and the Occupation and both inscribed those explanations into a larger picture which gave them meaning. 

Louis Althusser presented the ENS as the critical heart of the French Communist Party, thereby also declaring it responsible for the intellectual health of the nation. The ENS communist cellule aspired to be the guardian of orthodoxy in the French Communist Party and saw its role in the promotion of Marxism-Leninism at the most abstract level. For the Marxists at the ENS, the primary struggle was academic and the battleground was the classroom. At its peak, this uncritical, or hypercritical, Stalinism firmly imprinted itself on life at the ENS.

The communist cellule were resistant to Sartre and Heidegger, but not to Sartre’s other German source: Husserl. Althusser suggested that Husserl’s project was like Kant’s: a transcendental philosophy that would found a science. 

From 1950, a non-Sartrean interpretation of Husserl was beginning to emerge at the ENS, the impetus for which was Tran Duc Thao’s Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, published in 1951. According to Thao, Husserl’s work, if read carefully,  provided a phenomenological justification for Marxist dialectical materialism. 

By the end of the 1950s, reflecting broader trends in French philosophy, those at the ENS had come to regard Husserl as a resource for Marxist scientific thought and Heidegger as a quasi-Christian thinker. 

Derrida’s philosophical history, with his interest in Kierkegaard and Christian existentialism, would seem to incline him towards the Catholic grouping. By Derrida’s own account, it was to dissident left-wing groups that he belonged. However, by taking a 'liberal' position in comparing French colonialism unfavourably to the standards of French republicanism, Baring suggests that even while Derrida may have been sympathetic to the communists’ social aims, it indicates a significant divergence on matters of ideology. 

In this polarising situation at the ENS, where it was no longer possible to make explicit references to Christian existentialists, Derrida turned to the only one of his early sources regarded by the communists as ideologically acceptable: Husserl. 

Derrida presented his work as a meditation on the phenomenological reductions, but not the familiar epoches, the eidetic and transcendental reductions of the German phenomenologist. Instead, Derrida organised his work around three reductions: aesthetic; ethical; and transcendental. 

The aesthetic reduction was to the pure immediacy of the moment without relation, absolute discontinuity, without an integrated place in a larger whole. The ethical reduction sought to integrate all elements into a totality, a struggle through complexity to find the simple elements that controlled it, a hidden order governing the mass of conscious acts.

Derrida’s reductions were a re-writing in Husserl’s language of the first two stages described in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Derrida’s third option, transcendental reduction, might compare with the religious stage in Either/Or. The transcendental encompasses both the variability of the aesthetic and the moral striving of the ethical. This subordinated phenomenology to the religious questions motivating Derrida’s earlier thought. 

While Derrida did not succumb or subscribe fully to the communist or Christian ideological systems prevalent at the ENS, both leave indelible marks on his future philosophy, as he struggled with the entanglement of philosophy with religion, on the one hand, and of philosophy with politics, on the other hand, as well as the complex nexus constituted by philosophy-religion-politics for Western philosophy.

He engages with the onto-theology of Christianity, with its interpretation of logos as both ‘word’ and world’, its aetiological hierarchy of ’world’ following upon ‘word’ and its ontology of ousia or substance. It is this engagement which motivates his concern for the hierarchisation of ‘word’, metaphorised as ‘speech’, over ‘world’, metaphorised as ‘writing’, and the dualism of breath-word-speech, in short ‘God’, and substance-world-writing, or God’s creation.

Through this engagement with onto-theology, Derrida understands the Hegelian aufhebung or dialectic as a variety of onto-theology, situating Hegel as the pinnacle of Christian metaphysical discourse. It is in the context of his engagement with Hegel, as Christian onto-theologist, that Derrida understands Marx’s ‘reversal’ of ‘word’ and ‘world’, an inversion which leaves the metaphysical apparatus intact but which grounds a substantivist, materialist aetiology in which ‘word’ derives from ‘world’. It is thus as ‘dialectical materialism’, rather than as 'historical materialism’, particularly in the Stalinist form that it took at the ENS in the 1950s, with its accompanying socialist realism, that Derrida engages with, and is critical of, in the Marxist tradition.

Derrida, thus, sees Marx’s thought as being interwoven with the Christian onto-theology of Hegel, putting him in an impossible, or undecidable, situation in relation to the Catholic-communist split within the ENS, both at a social level and at an intellectual level. At a social level, coming from an Algerian Jewish background, although sympathetic to Christian existentialism, Derrida did not fit within the Catholic social grouping. At an intellectual level, for Derrida, the two poles, communist and Catholic, while contraries, were not simply opposed as contradictories. Perceiving Marx’s (early) thought to be pervaded by Hegelian dialectic, he cannot simply accept the messianic (or soteriological) and teleological strains implicit in Marx's 'inversion' or 'reversal' of Hegel, due to the latter's incorporation of Christian onto-theology. Especially unacceptable is the mutilated Stalinist form of 'dialectical materialism' or ‘diamat’, a notion which may, indeed, be at odds with some aspects of Marx's subsequent development of 'historical materialism' as a critical engagement with political economy. 

Baring, E. (2011). Normalization: The Ecole Normale Superieure and Derrida’s turn to Husserl. In: The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945-1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 82–112.