Adam Tenenbaum - Anti-Human Responsibilities For A Postmodern.pdf

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Studies in Philosophy and Education
19:
369–385, 2000.
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (Ed.), Conflicting Philosophies of Education in Israel/Palestine.
© 2000
Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
369
Anti-human Responsibilities for a Postmodern
Educator
ADAM TENENBAUM
Levinski College, Israel
Abstract.
Modern education has invested in exiling or normalizing violences. Its discourse seeks
to implement economies, which may exercise only the necessary kinds of violence and avoid as
much violence as possible. Postmodern education implies a new constellation in the discourse of
violence and responsibility. An ethics of violence might have to be retraced. Education would have
to implement a new array of sensitivities and violences.
Key words:
responsibility, education, violence, sensitivities, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze,
Derrida
Guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility
is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible
enough.
(J. Derrida,
The Gift of Death,
p. 51)
The issues of postmodern education have called for various distinctions, which
enable us to cope with the realities of the rapidly evolving postmodern condition.
These realities enforce upon us not only the recognition of its foldings and differ-
entiations, but also force upon thinking to grasp these realities within a process of
relinquishing dialectical conceptualities. Philosophers of education have suggested
to distinguish between thin and thick multicultural politics, between conservative-
liberal and radical or counter cultural pluralism, between skeptical and oppositional
postmodernism.
1
It seems that postmodern realities in Israel (which are interlaced strongly with
traditional, religious and modern realities) call for a different response and for a
more demanding conceptuality. Postmodern thinking might be on the right track for
coping with such a responsibility. However, it would have to liberate itself of some
dogmas of liberal and critical thinking. For the task of the educator, a rethinking of
his responsibilities might set him on the right track.
[7]
370
Postmodern Identities in Israel
ADAM TENENBAUM
I would like to mention two factors, which play a crucial role in the shaping of
responsibilties and obligations to the national, economic, religious and political
needs.
The first plays indeed a demonic role in current debates and struggles. The
issue of remembering Auschwitz and drawing a capital of identity and legitimacy
indeed causes the irruption of many ghosts. I do not wish to indulge in a critique
of the borderlines between responsible and irresponsible instrumentalization on all
levels of political, religious, ethical and ideological education. The main task for a
postmodern educator will be to ask the most responsible and terrifying questions
regarding the possibility and impossibility of naming this evil. If Auschwitz is the
name for the nameless evil, for the absolute unnamable evil on earth, then the
postmodern educator has to cope with the terrifying silence with which thinking
covers up this demonic rupture. He has to teach a form of listening to this demonic
silence. Otherwise all other forms of critique and of responsible attempts to cope
with this demonic nameless memory will be drawn into the discourse of truth, value
and meaning, and thus become victim to its horrifying meaninglessness in facing
the faceless evil.
The second issue occupying the current stage of modern national education is
the feeling that the attempt to modernize all Diasporas and melt different traditional
identities into a national and capitalistic identity has gone partly bankrupt. There
is a struggle for retaining identities, perspectives, unique cultural values, codes of
behaviour and religious values. Each group feels obliged to enforce its own form
of violence and to oppose the competing group.
A kaleidoscope of perspectives emerges. However, one should keep in mind
that not all perspectives insist on their own unique violence. Violence depends on
whether certain values or differences are taken as essential or even as sacred. This
requires subjective emotions, which dominate such processes (especially when
there are no more true essences or sanctities in force; the emotions are directed
mainly to preserving fragments, traces, supplements), to be distinguished from
objective realities, which enforce their essential or sacred values. One could sum-
marize this by claiming that if more essence is preserved then more violence has
a potential to be unleashed. Liberal analysis assumes that violence is only on one
side (the anti-liberal one) and strives for creating a space of nonviolence for a thick
multiculturalism. Thin culturalism is still feasible only when a competition (less
than a struggle) between traces of different perspectives is taking place. However,
the traces remind us that the essential violence of modernity (enforcing a space
for liberalism) has succeeded to erase all other essential violences (except for a
few leftovers to be ‘digested’ by more liberal attitudes). Postmodern discourse is
liable to forget that we are the inheritors of a conceptual and cultural space, which
is the result of a violence directed toward all other essential identities. Within
this space has evolved the task for directing the dance on the stage of thin mul-
[8]
ANTI-HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES FOR A POSTMODERN EDUCATOR
371
ticultural perspectives. Thick multiculturalism is aware of the difficulties for the
director on the stage of this reality, but does not cope with the essential question of
violence.
Violence within different cultural and conceptual spaces enforces different forms
of struggle. One of the striking facts about our modern-postmodern condition is
that modernity has already performed the task of erasure of most other violences.
We can be more liberal and diminish this form of violence metaphysically inherent
to modernity, and let the not-yet-erased violences persist. We will deal with them
with less violence since we have already occupied the stage of history.
Since there are no internal or external forces to keep down these struggles, there
is a most interesting irruption of competing identities: Jewish vs. Israeli, Ashkenazi
vs. Sepheradic, western vs. oriental. The postmodern condition in Israel (in its
political, ethical and capitalistic economies) prevents a central discourse (of civil
rights) to take the upper hand and the market is open for all kinds of violences
to throw in their bets. Some react in a casual manner, believing that the modern
identity has already conquered all forms of violence. The current struggles are
seen as marginal and focus on contingent left over traces. Some react in panic and
would like to keep the modern, liberal humanistic identity as a trend struggling
along with all other trends, but each within its own guaranteed autonomies. Both
kind of reactions exhibit the same lack of awareness for the need to develop a
postmodern form of education based on the sensitivities of violence, and not on
denying them or seeking immunity from them.
Responsibility and Violence
The subject who is able to take upon himself his responsibility (and is this not
the definition of a subject) takes upon himself guilt. Ironically, the
irresponsible
subject is the one who takes upon himself less guilt.
2
The more responsibility,
the more innocence. This would still be a (Christian) dialectical reading, even if it
carries with it a heretical flavor: thinking the possibility of religion without religion,
of divinity without the divine. We might be led to an ethic of violence.
The responsibilities of violence may escape precisely such an ethic of sacrifice,
the ethic of infinite love. Violence is an ethic, which crosses out guilt. It does not
cross out the other, but returns him to Being (also crossed out), without repentance
and without salvation. It is an ethics of a crossed out mortality, a humanity not put
to the cross, nor to the possibility of the cross.
Violence as an ethic signifies human-
ity crossed out.
Or rather, it does not signify, but marks the borders of signification
and puts them to the test. Humanity is delivered to its violence without remorse
and without regrets. Violence as an ethic insists on the possibility that salvation
could be the worst violence, the most unethical violence (even if it may be the least
violence within a calculative ethic).
[9]
372
ADAM TENENBAUM
Violence is not the chaos which constantly threatens to fall upon civilized
society. It is not the devil coming from the outside to unmask the soft and tender
tissue, which covers and protects humanity. Violence is not the other of humanity.
It is not the annihilation of the other. Violence is not an outer nor an inner force
within an economy and within an ethics whose efficiency is measured according to
the efficiency with which violence is kept down, sometimes at all costs.
3
What could be the grounds for a good violence as opposed to a bad violence?
Who is to decide? And within which kind of economy should this decision take
place? This may harbor a vagueness and may lead to indecisiveness. This would be
quite an ironic price to pay as a result of granting violence a positive role with
no ground, and without any transcendence for justification. Those were happy
times when violence could be addressed as the necessary evil whose (always)
temporary application was leaning on an eternal justification. However, there is
no need to flee to an indecisive hesitation. Rather, if violences are there for us to
be embraced, then we have to decide on new sensitivities for violence. We have
to acquire a different responsibility and we should shape harsher moralities. We
are no longer the masters of violence and suffering, and nor should we remain its
slaves.
Violence may have a transcendental status or an ontological one. It may be the
law to which we all are obliged by necessity. Or it may be the truth of being which
occupies our horizon of meaningfulness and which threatens us with the possibility
of nonsense.
Violence may serve as the transcendental condition of education. Violence has
to be the form for any project of education.
4
There is no crucial or essential dif-
ference whether our identity or life is at stake, or whether it is the lawfulness of
our exchange or the meaningfulness of our communicative behavior. In all cases
violence serves as the form which governs our identity and our life, our lawfulness
and our sense.
We have no choice but to return to this form of education (instead of pondering
on fashionable contents and procedures of education) for the simple reason that we
stand in the abyss, on the stage of a history without foundation and without essence
to be handed out. We cannot just be happy with all kinds of simulacra handed over
as replacements, including the ideology of the totality of simulacra.
5
We stand in
the dark night of the impoverished times of education and cannot wait for the gods
or the poets for their deliverance. We must educate from within the abyss and face
without nostalgia the possibilities of violence at hand without deciding a priori on
which side shall the good violences fall.
6
The postmodern educator cannot embark upon an idea, buy only enhance the
experience of the marks imprinted upon and within the abyss. This enhancement
embarks from the non-presence of holiness (and of godliness) in order to (re-) enter
the ethical space of holiness which may serve as the dimension for the arrival of the
gods who have withdrawn their presence. Only within holiness do the gods have
an ether of spirit for passing through. We continue to face the traces of the gods
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ANTI-HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES FOR A POSTMODERN EDUCATOR
373
who have withdrawn. Holiness might present itself as an economy of violence, or
as a space of pure violence.
Poetry still begets its breath of inspiration within the traces of holiness. In an
analogical manner, the educator has to reside within the traces of pure violence.
The educator works within the purity of violence. The poet works within the purity
of holiness. To be a poet in the abyss involves marking strictly the traces of the
non-present gods. To be an educator in impoverished times (lacking divinity) in-
volves a strict obedience
7
and sensitivity to the economies of violence: the traces
of violences, the violences, which keep the marks of the traces alive, the violences,
which the retreating gods leave behind, the violence of pure non-presence. The
postmodern educator teaches sensitivities and obedience to economies of violence
interlacing their marks and their traces within the abyss. I am not sure whether
this ‘mission’ involves just the disciples, or whether it is also directed towards
any clients the system of education has to serve. Within the system it may not be
necessary to make a choice.
The present violences are interlaced within the traces of withdrawn violences.
The task of the postmodern educator is to develop forms of respect for the pure
violence, which is present and non-present within the economies of violence. The
respect developed within an economy of violence has to shape itself in the form of
an effective and efficient handling of the violences from within and from without.
Pure violence would not be a transcendental idea, a regulative function for the ef-
fectiveness and efficiency of violence. It would rather serve as the difference stand-
ing behind the logic and lawfulness of these economies and their transgressions and
nonsense.
Heidegger sees us in a state of indecision. Are we still experiencing holiness in
the form of traces leading us to the godliness of the godly? Or, do we meet only
traces leading to holiness. It is not clear to us what could still be the traces, which
lead us to such traces.
8
We live in such impoverished times that we cannot even
sense a disclosure of the essence of pain, death and love. Our lack of essence shapes
a state of lack, which is doubly impoverished, since we do not suffer from the lack
of essence. We do not miss it. The space for essences has withdrawn itself from us,
i.e. the space in which pain, death and love belong. We do not name anymore pain,
death and love, as we have no way to know them. We only can name the abyss of
this absence.
When we have to educate, we are obliged to deal with the non-presence of pain,
death and love, even though we are not facing this non-presence during the process
of shaping a subject proper to it. We are obliged to supply this faceless subject with
a sign marking the nameless forgetting. The subject who does not face pain, death
and love must still be able to follow the shallow marks of this sign. This sign marks
the truth of his age: the death of god and the non-presence of death. The subject of
nihilism must learn to experience this truth via the economies of violence, which
remain in charge. Living in the face of the death of god means to act within these
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