Against Reconciliation: Constituent Power, Ethics, and the Meaning of Democratic Education

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Theory-Making: Tensions and Possibilities

Abstract

Starting from autonomist theorist Antonio Negri’s concept of constituent power and from decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel’s description of an ethics of exteriority, this study outlines key principles for radical democratic curriculum and pedagogy in the present. The paper contrasts these philosophical starting points with central assumptions in progressive education, and shows that a critical conception of democracy should be developed in a way that is sensitive to the insurrectionary imagination and ethics that are foregrounded in Negri and Dussel. On this basis, I argue that we should rethink democratic education in the first instance in terms of trauma, rather than reconciliation, and that we should look past familiar senses of criticality toward a decolonial disruption of the curriculum’s epistemological order.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin