Derrida's responsibility: Autobiography, the teaching of the vulnerable, diary fragments

Abstract

This essay explores the possibilities of creating links to Derrida's writing rather than representing or analyzing his thought. Through intertextual readings, the paper employs rhetorical tropes from Derrida to rethink educational relationships and, in a reverse move, builds on figures and insights from educational experience to recover alternative sites of contact in Derrida's texts that engage the reader in a re-writing of Derrida. “We are all,” Donna Haraway wrote recently, “in chiasmatic borderlands, liminal areas where new shapes, new kinds of action and responsibility, are gestating in the world.” This essay reflects an effort to rethink philosophy of education and textual analysis as articulation of these borderlands. Ongoing conversations with Nick Burbules helped both of us sustahvthe heterogeneity of these links and endure the challenge of an unfinished rewriting. His call to respond to the interview, his responses to earlier drafts of this essay, and his willingness to read and reread Derrida, made my response possible.