Critical Pedagogy and Phenomenology

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy: New Philosophical Interventions

Abstract

Phenomenology - Jean-Luc Marion stands out as one of the most respected and original voices in contemporary phenomenology today, especially of the French school. A student of Jacques Derrida, Marion situates himself within the phenomenological tradition in a uniquely postmodern place and time, unlike the more essentialist caricatures of Husserl and Heidegger. At the same time, his work has also challenged phenomenology at its very core. Marion’s “third reduction,” the reduction into giveness, places a prior, (post)metaphysical condition upon Being: Being is given. This challenge contributed to the theological turn in phenomenology, much disputed in the 1990’s, and presents new challenges and dimensions today. It is important to acknowledge, albeit briefly, the present state of the phenomenological conversation.

Critical Pedagogy - At the very core of the notion of critical pedagogy is a concept of the political that, sometimes, approaches becoming ideological, something like an anti-metaphysical metaphysics, usually couched in ethics. This popular claim is instructive: “everything is political.” I will show how this notion of politics is educationally problematic because it fails to support a descriptive account of teaching that takes into account the aesthetic offering of teaching and the teacher, and, instead, can only address the brute political force of dialectics, e.g. margin and center, presence and absence, ethical notions of good vs. evil, post/anti/de-coloniality, etc. This approach, I will argue, is to win at a total cost, to bring death to the people in order to save them from destruction.

Recent theorists have tried to conceive of an aesthetic account of politics and ethics with educational implications—most notably Jacques Ranciere and Gayatri Spivak. These interventions are not phenomenological (although one can find similarly normative concerns in the work of phenomenologists like Max Scheler and Emmanuel Levinas). This fine line, dividing the normative from the descriptive, is where I will claim that phenomenology can make its most incisive intervention, albeit one in need of serious limits, provisos, and possible extensions. One significant example is the emerging work being done by Troy Richardson analyzing the risk that ethical theories pose for indigenous accounts of de-colonial theory.

This paper will do the following two things: (a) briefly explore and critique Marion’s phenomenology of giveness while using it as a way of rethinking and challenging critical pedagogy’s conception of the political/ethical and (2) speculatively rehearse—and perhaps revise—Richardson’s overall position and concerns, alongside my own work, advocating a “folkloric reversal” within phenomenology. Both should prove to being possible and present ways of building a path of fruitful engagement with education and pedagogy by practicing the theory of phenomenology in the spirit of de-colonial and indigenous longings, needs, and aspirations.

Author

• Sam Rocha, University of North Dakota