| Policy Futures in Education |
ISSN 1478-2103 | |
Volume 8
Issues
3 & 4 2010
| |
Other
issues available | Journal
home page | Publisher
home page |
|
|
|
CONTENTS [click
on author's name for abstract and full text]
|
|
|
|
SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education
Guest editor: ILAN GUR-ZE’EV
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Introduction, pages 258‑270 doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.258 VIEW
FULL TEXT
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and
Diasporic Co-poiesis in the Era of Mega-speed, pages 271‑287
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education
in Context: the Israeli-Palestinian example, pages 288‑297
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic philosophy, Negative
Theology and counter-education, pages 298‑314
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Beyond Peace Education: toward co-poiesis and enduring
improvisation, pages 315‑339
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diasporic Philosophy, Counter-Education and Improvisation,
pages 340‑345
Daniel Boyarin in conversation with Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Judaism, Post-colonialism
and Diasporic Education in the Era of Globalization, pages 346‑357
Cornel West in conversation with Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diaspora,
Philosophy and Counter-Education in the Face of Post-colonial Reality, pages
358‑380
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev in conversation with Jonathan Boyarin. The
Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative
Theology, pages 381‑397
Zygmunt Bauman. Education in the World of Diasporas, pages 398‑407
Rosi Braidotti. Nomadism: against methodological nationalism, pages
408‑418
Tzvetan Todorov. The Coexistence of Cultures, pages 419‑426
Ignacio L. Götz. Vignettes of Ambiguity, pages 427‑439
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Language, Identity, and Exile, pages 440‑445
Michael Peters. Wittgenstein as Exile: a philosophical topography, pages
446‑456
Ilan Pappe. Diaspora as Catastrophe, Diaspora as a Mission and the Post-colonial
Philosophy of Edward Said, pages 457‑466
Arie Kizel. Homelessness, Restlessness and Diasporic Poetry, pages
467‑477
Yotam Hotam. Ecology and Pedagogy: on the educational implications of
postwar environmental philosophy, pages 478‑487
|
|
The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and
Diasporic Co-poiesis in the Era of Mega-Speed
|
|
ILAN GURZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of
Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.271
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
The history of transcendence and nomadism in face of the
call for ‘home-returning’ is marked figuratively by four milestones: (1) the ‘era’
of immanence and dwelling in total harmony as a manifestation of self-sustained
holiness; (2) the ‘era’ of relating to holiness by mediation of God, especially
in the monotheistic religions; (3) the ‘era’ of killing-God-each-moment-anew as
a path for regaining contact with holiness in Enlightenment’s progress and the
deification of humanity; and (4) the ‘era’ of the exile of the killer of God
and the forgetfulness of the holy imperative of the progressive deification of
humanity and the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew. These four
milestones are paralleled by growing changes and speeding of (de)constructions
as part of the de-positioning of the human as dweller of this world or,
alternatively, as a genuine Diasporic nomad. The current change in the history
of human’s search for itself, its meaning and its telos is realized in an
historical moment of change: from rapid changes into an arena of mega-speed, an
era in which the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew is replaced by the
exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the humanist’s telos within
the immanence of the present dull anti-metaphysical moment within which the
relations between space and time are transformed; both the quest for
redemption/home-returning and the call for revolutionary progress and human’s
self-edification are forgotten, ridiculed, deconstructed and swallowed into the
postmodern-neo-liberal system. Linear time and the quest for transcendence are
overwhelmed by punctual time, end of historical consciousness, quasi-nomadism
and the possibility to solve all human responsibility and shortcomings by
plugging in to the pleasure machine. In face of this reality Diasporic
philosophy and its improvised co-poiesis become relevant for the possibility of
counter-education.
|
|
Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education in
Context: the Israeli-Palestinian example
|
|
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of
Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.288
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Under current historical conditions, as Israelis, Jews are
structurally almost prevented from facing the possibility of living in light of
the Messianic impetus, as the world’s universal moral, intellectual, and
creative vanguard. This special Jewish mission was made possible by the Jews’
unique homelessness – a Diasporic existence as a realized ideal of a community
that is not a collective. Diasporic life is ultimately a kind of life in which
the yahid (individual, not found in liberal terminology) is afforded, as
an ecstatic way of moral life, an existence that allows a universalistic moral
responsibility and intellectual commitment to overcome any dogma and content
with the world of ‘facts’ and to reject the promises of mere power, glory, and
pleasure. All this has changed in face of the successes of Zionist education
and its political realizations. Unreserved siding against injustice inevitably
endangers the very existence of Israel, not solely its current policies. As a
genuine dialectical realization of Diasporic philosophy, counter-education in Israel
cannot become instrumentalized, cannot become a collective self-imposed mass
immigration. It is not solely a moral-political concrete dilemma facing us
nowadays; it is fundamentally a philosophical and existential antinomy.
Ultimately, it begins and ends in and by the individual, who is willing to
overcome his or her self and to open the gates to the nomadic existence of a
brave lover of Life and creativity. The new exodus is from Israel and the
Zionist nation-building project as a present-day ‘Egypt’ as a home. It is an
exodus from a distorted concept of Diasporic life, from the concept of ‘Egypt’
in the form of all versions of ‘homecoming’ and a monotheistic way, to rebuild
or go back to the Garden of Eden. In the face of the new anti-Semitism as the
meta-narrative of the new progressive thinking there is a special role to the
present challenge of the unification of an ongoing moral struggle for the
realization of the essence of Judaism, and transcending it into a universal
alternative human existence.
|
|
Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic philosophy, Negative
Theology, and counter-education
|
|
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of
Haifa, Israel
| |
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.298
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
The later Horkheimer presents mature Critical Theory as a
Jewish Negative Theology. This change carries major educational implications
hegemonic critical pedagogy has not yet dared to address until now and much
less in the present era of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the
progressive circles. In Horkheimer’s work the change from a Marxian Critical
Theory to a Diasporic philosophy is paralleled by an articulation of Critical
Theory as a new, Jewish, Negative Theology. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics
follows the same path, attempting to present ‘counter-education’ as a worthy
addressing of the present absence of the quest for transcendence and meaning,
and as a Diasporic form of awaiting as a self-education for the human stance of
readiness to be called upon. The refusal to dwell in peace in the present order
of things, the negation of the ‘facts’ of the actuality, are but a
manifestation of the rejection of metaphysical violence and of all kinds of ‘homes’,
dogmas, and self-satisfaction in a world of pain, injustice, ugliness, and
betrayed love. Since Adorno and Horkheimer refused a positive Utopia, their
mature thought could not promise a better world as a justification for
resistance to normalizing education and the quest for pleasure, ‘success’, and
hegemony. Homelessness and the moral importance of suffering are here grounded
ontologically and become a religious way of life. In this the Frankfurt School
thinkers followed Benjamin’s lead: it is a kind of religiosity which is
Messianic without a Messiah. As a counter-education it holds out no promise of
salvation or of redemption. But it might offer a Messianic moment, which will
overcome the violence of the governing ‘now-time’ and open the gate to an
alternative way of life. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s later work offers a
framework for counter-educational praxis whose religiosity is fertilized by the
alarming resistance to educational optimism in light of an alternative,
Diasporic co-poiesis and enduring responsible improvisation.
|
|
Beyond Peace Education: toward co-poiesis and enduring
improvisation
|
|
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of
Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.315
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Is it possible that the essence of peace is negated in peace
education? And is it possible that even against its own will peace education
calls for the negation of its negation? In peace education no serious attempts
have been made to elaborate its most central concepts. ‘Pacifism’, ‘violence’,
‘counter-violence’ and ‘emancipation’, ‘culture of peace’, among others, have
still not been probed. Peace education, actually, is a serious threat to human
edification. Peace for the eternal Jew, for the enduring improviser, is a
condition of the one who found his way: an endless path of a nomad that has
Love but no other ‘home’, dogma or quest for ‘home-returning’ into thingness,
the continuum or the Same. He will never find and never search for ‘peace’ as
an end of Diasporic existence and terminality of the suffering of the nomad. He
will be at peace with his mission of avoiding history within history, of
overcoming the temptation to be part of the collective ‘I’/consensus/pleasure
machine/truth, and often he will be tired, ridiculed, punished or executed. But
he will be also rewarded, each moment anew, for being at peace with his refusal
of ‘peace’: he will be a freer and a richer improviser that his co-poiesis with
the world, the Other, and he himself gives birth to Love. As such, the eternal
improviser is mature enough to meet the alterity of other free nomads and
Diasporic humans, as well as the gifts of other free-minded spirits. They too,
as Nietzsche tell us, feel at home on the mountain, in the forest, and within
their loneliness. But for the eternal improviser there is more and there is
less than the rewards of the eternal Nietzschean nomad. This is so since the
Nietzschean nomad is rewarded with presents and finally finds harmony in
himself and the right path to the freedom of reason. The eternal improviser,
however, is a more consistent Nietzschean than the Nietzschean nomad and is
never appeased, domesticated or rewarded by any ‘home’. Homelessness, eternal
Diaspora and improvisation worthy of the name cannot offer any ‘reward’ or rest
in the (right) paved way, be it ‘external’ or ‘internal’, transcendent or
immanent. Here counter-education reintroduces peace as a realization of Love
and worthy togetherness with the cosmos, with the Other, with worthy suffering
and with one’s self.
|
|
Diasporic Philosophy, Counter-Education and Improvisation
|
|
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of
Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.340
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of
loss, exile, and the deceiving ‘home-returning’ projects accepts that no
positive Utopia awaits us as ‘truth’, ‘genuine life’, ‘worthy struggle’, ‘pleasure’
or worthy self-annihilation. Loss is not to be recovered or compensated; not
for the individual nor for any kind of ‘we’. And yet, Love of Life is the home
of the Diasporic in the Socratic sense of Eros as an attracting absence of the
beautiful. Counter-education should invite the Diasporic to the hospitality of
Love of Life. Such hospitality calls for overcoming conventional morality and
the other imperatives of the ethnocentric ‘we’, its self-evidence, its
normality, the counter-violence of the oppressed and its normalized patriotic
citizenship. The determination for Diasporic life and the possibilities opened
by Diasporic counter-education is always ironic. It is never at home. The heart
of improvisation is this movement within co-poiesis as a togetherness offered
by Love of Life. It gives birth to the totally new. To the wholly unexpected
that the Diasporic human faces its hospitality as alterity and togetherness
symbolized by the Orcha; a form of non-instrumental nomadic playfulness
that manifests erotic responsibility to Life at its best. Improvisation
manifests the dialectics of response-ability and respond-ability. It is not ‘constructive’
nor is it merely ‘negative’. It is far from a manifestation of ‘resistance’ to
oppression or suffering and loss. In the context of Diasporic counter-education
it plays a special role as part of Love of Life and co-poiesis that challenges
the matrix of whose manifestations traditional critical pedagogy is part and
parcel.
|
|
Judaism, Post-colonialism and Diasporic Education in the Era
of Globalization
|
|
DANIEL BOYARIN in conversation with ILAN GUR-ZE’EV
| |
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.346
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Diaspora is a cultural situation in which a group of people
have a dual cultural alliance, dual cultural allegiance – to a cultural or
cultures in the place where they are and to a culture or cultures in another
place to which they are related by etiological memory, other strategies to read
the past like shared values, shared religion, and so on. So Diaspora is a very
precise term to describe a particular kind of culture in synchronic time. It
does not necessarily have to be based on a particular history. The sense of
dual cultural allegiance and dual cultural alliance – before a person, yes,
there was a language and history and praxis in the place where he or she is and
also an alliance with others somewhere else. That particular dual cultural
situation is what can be understood as Diaspora. It produces double
consciousness, it is the first of the fruits: the ability to be critical.
Critical not necessarily in a formal manner like the Frankfurt School but some
sense of distance or some sense of reflection that comes between a human and
his or her identity.
|
|
Diaspora, Philosophy and Counter-Education in the face of
Post-colonial Reality
|
|
CORNEL WEST in conversation with ILAN GUR-ZE’EV
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.358
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Human life begins in the middle, in the midst, and sometimes
in the darkness. Or even in the woods. In the woods – you’re in the middle and
if you are always in the middle there is no home, or refuge or cave – a sure
space that you have access to. It means then that the best we can do is to
somehow try to strengthen our armor on the Socratic level – which is we must
have courage to engage in critical reflection on being in the middle, knowing
that there is always a remainder for Adorno the stuff that theories can’t
catch. It is the blind spots, the wasted material. Blind spots and wasted
material that the dialectics cannot catch, which is the saying that there is a
humility in being in the middle and to think you gain access to pure spaces of
intellectual arrogance, which is blinding all the time and misleading. So, if
you have a humility, which is not so much to come to skepticism, it is simply
to say you would resist, you would transgress, you would continually try to
transcend, you will fail, you will fall on your face, you would be inadequate,
you won’t have the conceptual clarity and transparency associated with pure
spaces – you are a bluesman. There is no way out.
|
|
The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources
of Jewish Negative Theology
|
|
ILAN GUR-ZE’EV in conversation with JONATHAN BOYARIN
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.381
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
A new critical language is possible yet its becoming is not
guaranteed. Its roots and sources should be diverse, universal and Diasporic.
Jewish negative theology is ultimately Diasporic and could become one of its
edifying sources. Diaspora is not only an intellectual state, not necessarily
collective but communal. One of the things that makes the notion most vital is
the possibility and the cultural technology of generational continuity in the
absence of a majority. It is true that there is always a danger of
sentimentalism. A great deal of post-Enlightenment terror, both in the sense of
individual terror, and eventually organized violence, has to do with the
inability of an isolated organism that is aware of its own mortality to achieve
some kind of equanimity with the fact of its own mortality. One of the key
driving forces of the symbolic aspects of almost all human cultures until now
has been to strengthen a real, not just a sentimental force, in structuring
identificatory practices such that the organism does not, in the first
instance, understand existence as starting with its birth and ending with its
death, but almost in the first instance understands existence as being a
continuity and a cycle, inflected by its own mortality. This mortality and the
endurance of Life in face of the prospects of worthy life is the gate for a new
understanding of transcendence, critique and emancipation. Today the most vital
power of enriching the critical language is the new anti-Semitism. The
prospects of an alternative revitalization of the critical language and the
possibility of a language that challenges the exile of holiness and transcends
critique is here addressed in light of the Jewish tradition.
|
|
Education in the World of Diasporas
|
|
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN University of Leeds, United
Kingdom
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.398
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Today’s culture consists of offerings, not norms.
Liquid-modern culture, unlike the culture of the nation-building era, has no ‘people’
to ‘cultivate’. The solid-modern policy of dealing with difference, the policy
of assimilation to the dominant culture and stripping the strangers of their
strangehood, is no longer feasible. For the young, the main attraction of the
virtual world derives from the absence of contradictions and cross-purposes
that haunt the off-line life. Unlike its off-line alternative, the online world
renders the infinite multiplication of contacts conceivable – both plausible
and feasible. It does it through the weakening of bonds – in a stark opposition
to its off-line counterpart, known to find its bearings in the continuous
effort to strengthen the bonds by severely limiting the number of contacts
while deepening each one of them. It is the quantity of connections rather than
their quality that makes the difference between chances of success or failure.
A crisis, however, may linger just after the next corner. So it is too early to
decide how the ingrained world-views and attitudes of the present-day young
will eventually fit the world to come.
|
|
Nomadism: against methodological nationalism
|
|
ROSI BRAIDOTTI Arts Faculty, Utrecht University, The
Netherlands
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.408
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
This article is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical
nomadology and stresses the idea of subjectivity. It stresses the non-unitary,
complex and inter-relational structure of the process of subject-formation and
explores some of the implications of this structure for ethical relations,
politics and for pedagogical practice. As for ethical relations, the emphasis
falls on the ethics of affirmation and the extent to which they inform the
practice of nomadic, transversal subjectivities. Great value is given to
anti-nationalism, anti-racism and resistance to fixed and essentialized
cultural or national identities. The article then explores the methodological
implications of nomadic subjectivity: the rejection of the classical equation
between rational consciousness and universal values; extensive
trans-disciplinarity and the practice of non-linearity. The main argument is
that, by defending an open-ended and relational vision of the subject,
philosophical nomadic thought contributes to cosmopolitan community building
against narrow nationalistic practices and it sustains multiple ecologies of
belonging.
|
|
The Coexistence of Cultures
|
|
TZVETAN TODOROV
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.419
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Traditional links are being erased. When one lacks positive
elements in order to build one’s collective identity the temptation is strong
to hook on to negative elements – I am not like these immigrants who are
physically different from me, who speak another language, and who have strange
customs. My identity lies in rejecting them. Thus, the apocalyptic vision of a
homogeneous humanity is faced with a no-less-threatening vision – that of a
planet inhabited by tribes at war with each other. While the benefits of the
legalization of groups, in accordance with the communal or with the
multicultural model, are problematic, its perverse effects are easy to foresee.
Nationalism, or other forms of particularism, can serve towards fulfilling some
generous goals, on a punctual scale, but it is dangerous in its principle.
Universalism can be punctually misled and used to fulfill unacceptable goals;
however, its principle remains liberating. It is for this reason that it has
also been able to serve in order to eliminate its own perversions, such as in
the ancient colonies’ struggle for independence or in women’s fight for equal
rights. The author’s conclusion is that, on a political level, the preference
granted to collective belonging over individual freedom is poorly justified.
|
|
Vignettes of Ambiguity
|
|
IGNACIO L. GÖTZ New College, Hofstra University, New
York, USA
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.427
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
This article is an exploration of ambiguity as it appears in
various guises in philosophical, social, political, and educational situations.
Among these situations is the experience of exile. The exploration is conducted
by means of literary anecdotes and real-life instances, hence the use of
vignettes. The suggestion is made that ambiguity can be conquered only in the
concrete, through a life stamped by justice and solidarity with other fellow
human beings.
|
|
Language, Identity, and Exile
|
|
DAPHNA ERDINAST-VULCAN University of Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.440
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
The exilic mode of being, a living on boundary-lines,
produces a constant relativization of one’s home, one’s culture, one’s
language, and one’s self, through the acknowledgement of otherness. It is a
homesickness without nostalgia, without the desire to return to the same, to be
identical to oneself. The encounter with the other which produces a ‘transvaluation’
of one’s own culture is also the ultimately ethical experience of reading
oneself in quotation marks. Yeshurun’s work – fragmented, broken – is exilic in
its bifurcation, or multifurcation of consciousness, the superimposition of the
language of ‘there’ over the language of ‘here’. His descriptions of Tel-Aviv,
the white, modern, energetic emblem of the thrust to ‘make it new’ are oddly
and imperfectly plastered over by images of dilapidated buildings, uprooted
trees and rusty, dripping faucets. It is as though the poverty of a diasporic,
displaced existence has crept in and coloured over the façade of the new which,
torn from within, is already showing its fault-lines and cracks. Avot Yeshurun’s
longing for home does not yield to the consolations of kitsch or the
retrospective colourings of an idealized ‘before’, and the anguish of guilt is
its motor force. Yeshurun’s hybrid poetry with its bricolage of linguistic
fragments and shards finds its materials in the debris of a dead culture.
Enacting the return of the culturally repressed, the ghostly return of the
sacrificed mame-loshn with all the pain, the love, and perhaps the
inevitability of the repression, it does not seek to go back, to offer a
remedy, or mend the rift (more bottomless than the eponymous Syrian-African
geological one) with the exilic home-language. Rather more modest and
infinitely more difficult, it is the labour of mourning that it undertakes.
|
|
Wittgenstein as Exile: a philosophical topography
|
|
MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, USA
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.446
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Exilic thought is a kind of uprooted thought developed away
from ‘home’ under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a
different mother tongue, language tradition and culture. Exilic thought is sometimes
the self-imposed discipline of the ‘stranger’ who develops his or her identity
as an ‘alien’ or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from
the perspective of an outsider. The motif OF? the exile-stranger in a foreign
land finding his or her way about for the first time is fable-ized in ancient
accounts of ‘first contacts’ and early cultural exchanges. ‘Exile’ often marks
a complex ambivalence to one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to
questions of one’s own national, cultural and personal identity. Exile is one
of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth
century: it describes a profound existential condition of cultural
estrangement, and sometimes alienation, that defines identity in terms of migration,
movement, departure, homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is ‘nomadic’,
formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make
the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Exile was a condition that
Wittgenstein thought necessary to a form of life as philosopher. This idea took
on a particular hue when Wittgenstein ‘returned’ to philosophy (at least in a
formal sense) to focus upon cultural questions. It is as though Wittgenstein’s
focus on cultural questions – on questions that stand at the heart of human
culture – rather than questions of strict logic, required a simulation
of the anthropologist’s ‘observer-participant’ attitude and sense of detachment
in order to analyze ‘language-games’ and develop ‘perspicuous representations’.
|
|
Diaspora as Catastrophe, Diaspora as a Mission and the
Post-colonial Philosophy of Edward Said
|
|
ILAN PAPPE Department of History, University of Exeter,
United Kingdom
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.457
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Edward Said the refugee could not easily allow himself to
join in the celebration of demythologizing nationalism. His Palestinianism had
to coexist, uncomfortably, with his universalism. Time made this necessary
coexistence an asset, not a liability, and this in fact was his political
legacy for the future: Jews and Palestinians would have to reconcile to a
similar existence as does the national intellectual in exile. Like Said
himself, future society in Palestine would have to live on the border between
two and more cultures (including national ones), a society that would represent
alternative narratives to reality – instead of or next to the master national
narratives – as part of a process of restitution. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari defined these as ‘deterrritorialized’ societies built on the collapse
of master narratives. Said would probably have lived more comfortably with a
less postmodernist approach to deterritorialization, such as the one offered by
Henry Giroux in his pedagogic attempt to reconcile modernist and postmodernist
critique as part of what he termed the pedagogy of ‘Border Crossing’: one could
chart in post-conflictual Palestine a society in which identity is fragile,
dynamic and moves easily between origins, spheres and languages.
|
|
Homelessness, Restlessness and Diasporic Poetry
|
|
ARIE KIZEL University of Haifa, Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.467
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Can poetry be Diasporic? Can poetry free itself from the shackles
of conformism? Can it be independent and divergent, and not seek a home? Is it
capable of mustering its inner strengths and living without being enlisted by a
collective that accords it power? This article argues that poetry is essentially
dialectic. It has little vitality without the presence of the Other, without
interaction with him. However, it also contains independent, personal elements and
reaches its peak through the individual’s anti-conformist activity and
expression. Poetry, like language, enables us to view ourselves from outside,
thereby fulfilling an important role, similar to language itself, and it is created
by the individual’s alienation even from himself. Poetry may provide one of the
most creative potential tools of Diasporic philosophy, love and creativity
being its cornerstones, but it can also be a destructive factor seeking to
imprison the creative soul within a home with the solid walls of a rigid community.
|
|
Ecology and Pedagogy: on the educational implications of
postwar environmental philosophy
|
|
YOTAM HOTAM Faculty of Education, University of Haifa,
Israel
|
|
doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.478
|
| VIEW
FULL TEXT | BACK TO CONTENTS LIST |
|
Environmentalism, an ethical imperative to preserve and
protect nature, has become in the last decade a central ethical, political and
pedagogic theme. Against this background, this article focuses on the postwar
philosophy of the German-Jewish scholar Hans Jonas (1903‑93). It points
to Jonas’s radical theory of pedagogic responsibility, and to the manner in
which this theory advocated conciliation between ecocentric and anthropocentric
ecological approaches. The article further shows how this theory was informed
by Jonas’s theological reflections on a God who is concurrently transcendent
and immanent – a God who is both ‘exiled’ from the world and ‘at home’ within
the world. Jonas’s specific approach demonstrates the manner in which theology
informs eco-pedagogy; ecological education is thus demonstrated as
secular-theological phenomena.
|
|