The Possibility/Impossibility of a New Critical Language in Education

Download or read book The Possibility/Impossibility of a New Critical Language in Education written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The critique of Critical Pedagogy—in its current various trends and paths teaches me not only the shortcomings of various versions of Critical Pedagogy. No less important, it offers an invitation to a reflection on the limitations, costs, and open horizons of “critique” itself. It is an invitation to transcend “critique” as such. But what alternative do we have, and from where or with what ears might we listen to the music of the new call? What is it that awaits us outside the critical tradition that in an unproblematic manner we could use, internalize, or surrender ourselves to? Such questions reintroduce us to Utopia. They reintroduce us to the Utopia of the possibility of happiness of the kind that is neither made possible nor advocated by self-abandonment and enslavement/destruction of the otherness of the Other and the “I”. This book manifests a refusal to abandon Critical Theory’s telos; it offers no “solutions”, “victories of the oppressed”, and “emancipation”, neither does it promise “peace” and unproblematic “consensus”. On the contrary: all the eternal open, Diasporic individual can hope for is worthy Diasporic Love of Life, creativity, mature forms of togetherness, and eternal nomadism as a manifestation of co-poiesis.