"Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends" from Who's Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I. Stanford UP 2002.
(68) on the the targets of Greph, which ought to link its actiity with that of a research and information group about the publishing machine. Manifest (undisguised), the intention of what you read right here is a call for such activities, on the spot.
Here, for example, is not an indifferent place... (69)one must therefore avoid naturalizing this place. Naturalizing always, very nearly at any rate, amounts to neutralizing. By naturalizing, by affecting to consider what is not and never has been natural, one neutralizes...One conceals, rather, in an effect of neutrality, the active intervention of a force and machinery.
By passing off as natural (and therefore beyond question or transformation) the structures of the pedagogical institution...one carefully conceals the forces and interests that, without the slighest neutrality, dominate and master- impose themselves upon- the process of teaching from within a heterogeneous and divided agonistic field wracked with constant struggle.
But power itself is neutral, even if its workings never are?
(70) ..I am beginning to critique systematically..I am beginning by beginning to do so systematically and effectively: it is the systematic character that is important if one does not wnat to remain contect with verbal alibis, skirmishes, or scrapes that do not affect the system in place.
Does systematically mean that he is creating a logic, a paradigm, a rational system for others to follow (the workings of the math problem so other's can follow the process, which in turn creates a logic)? And systematic implies groups, relationships, multiple persons, and engagement with institutions?
(71) the work in which I was involved...the (affirmative) deconstruction of phallogocentrism as philosophy- did not belong simply to the forms of the philsophical institution. This work, by definition, sdid not limit itself to the theorectical, or even cultural or ideological, content.
(72)This work, then, tackled the ontological or transcendental subordination of the signifying body in relation to the ideality of the transcendental signified and to the logic of the sign; it tackled the transcendental authority of the signified as well as the signifer, and therefore that which constitutes the very essence of the philosophical.
Because the philosophical, in his terms, assumes that at least the logic of the sign is transcendental? So philosophy is accused of some kind of "objectivism" at the heart of its project, whereas deconstruction, of course, has at its center a kind of relativisation, or maybe, better, relationality (by which I mean the exposures of the relations of dependence). Dependence ultimately, for me, on acceptance- one can't see a logic until one chooses to (for whatever reason).
He then proceeds to take down philosophy as metaphysics, and the university structure as grown from and rooted on this. So really, he's with Friere: lets reset the context by which a mind learns to see, because its all about seeing and creating for oneself.
(79) Wherever teaching takes place, therefore- and in the philosophical par excellence- there are, within that field, powers, representing forces in conflict, dominated or dominating forces, conflicts and contradictions (what I call the effects of differance).
(81) As its name indicates, it always puts into practice, whether openly or not, choice, filtering, selectivity, election, elitism, and exclusion. The passiage I am speaking of describes the teaching of philosophy in the eighteenth century, in France: "it must not be forgotten that instruction was accompanied by an education that was religious in inspiration. Pedagogical practice always lags behind mores, no doubt because teaching is more retrospective than perspective"
Of course, deconstruction is not neutral, either, it premises as strong a system of mores, and now that it is dominant is just as coercive and seemless a world-view in its assumptions and condemnations.
the outdated structure of teaching can always be questioned as repitition...It originates in the semiotic structure of teaching, the practically semiotic interpretation of the pedagogical relation: Teaching delivers signs.
(90) His body becomes teaching when, the place of convergence and fascination, it becomes more than a center.
Right. It becomes a context.
(91) The capturing by erasure, this fascinating neutralization, always takes the form of a cadaverization of my body. ..Erasure, here indeed, on the one hand, the erosion of a text, surface, and its textual marks. The erosion is indeed the effect of a suppression and an repression, of a reactive bustle. On the other hand, and at the same time, erasure makes disappear, by sublime annihilation, the particular characteristics of a facies and of everything in the face that cannot be reduced to the vocable and audible.
