You shouldn’t divorce the form of the 1AC from it’s content. Prioritize open alternative spaces of teaching to destabilize systems of power, working within academia carries radical potential.

In his first publication focused explicitly on education, “Where a Teaching Body Begins and How it Ends,” Derrida challenges the image of the philosophy professor presupposed on each side of the debate over the reforms. He makes this challenge by questioning the coherence of the teaching body, in three ways. First, Derrida exploits the ambiguity in the phrase “teaching body [corps enseignant].” More commonly referring to the faculty as a whole, Derrida uses it to speak also of a professor’s physical body, and he suggests that the inability to decide the proper referent between these two uses follows from the teacher’s representative function. He makes this point by discussing his own position in the system: A repeater, the agrégé-répétiteur should produce nothing, at least if to produce means to innovate, to transform, to bring about the new. He is destined to repeat and make others repeat, to reproduce and make others reproduce: forms, norms, and a content. . . . With his students he must therefore make himself the representative of a system of reproduction. (WP, 75) In its ideal, the répétiteur’s sole job is to transmit philosophical knowledge generated elsewhere in the system. Lying at the bottom of the educational hierarchy, his individual body is irrelevant, fully absorbed into this structure of representation (and I use the male pronoun here to mark the fact that while there were female philosophy teachers at the time, the ideal remained male, something that Derrida here does not call into question). However, in a move resembling his early strategy of deconstruction, Derrida elevates this marginal figure to stand for all professors in the system. He argues that traditionally understood, all teaching functions according to a classical logic of signification, being the transmission of signified content by means of signifiers. All teachers are thus “repeaters” of a sort, even those supposedly the source of new philosophical knowledge. Further, Derrida displaces the traditional opposition by challenging the view that the individual teacher’s body is fully absent from the scene. Rather, he speaks of this body’s “erasure” and “withdrawal.” Both present and absent, the individual teacher retains a measure of sovereignty (at the end of the essay Derrida speaks of his body as “glorious,” evoking the Sun-king [WP, 90]), and so his body resists disappearing fully into the workings of the system. That is, no repeater ever purely repeats, for as an individual body he is always the site of an alternative teaching. The reference of the “teaching body” thus remains indeterminate, reducible to neither the individual nor the system.

Second, Derrida destabilizes the dominant understandings of the philosophy professor by arguing that there is a further division at work in the individual répétiteur’s body. This division arises from the fact that teacher is charged with transmitting material he no longer believes in, content he has criticized at length in his research, and with dispensing “technical advice in the name of a jury and canons that in his eyes have been discredited.” Derrida argues that this double structure carries over to the seminars the répétiteur teaches at the École, since there “he tries to help the ‘candidates,’ all the while introducing, like a long stream of contraband, premises that no longer belong to the space of the general agrégation, that even undermine it more or less underhandedly” (WP, 77). In addition, the students themselves frequently share the same attitude, believing that the material they must study for the test is already outdated. At best, Derrida suggests, the two “exchange complicit winks” (WP, 76), agreeing to play by the rules of a suspect system in order to succeed.

Third, Derrida also questions the standard views by highlighting the indeterminacy between the teaching body, considered as the faculty or collective body of professors, and what is usually seen as its outside. While the faculty’s power is “relatively autonomous ... itself appointing the juries of its competitive examinations or theses, its commissions or advisory committees” (WP, 76), it is also the case, Derrida notes, that the State plays a role in these appointments. The president of the jury for the agrégation, for example, is named by the Minister of Education, thus allowing the State to “determine who (and what) will determine, in a decisive and absolutely authoritarian fashion, the program and the filtering and coding mechanisms of all teaching.” Further, Derrida expands such “outside” forces to include “networks of tradition or repetition ... which have perpetuated themselves since the beginning of sophistry and philosophy.” I place “outside” in scare quotes to mark the immanent conception of power here supposed, for Derrida argues that this power only comes to be in the pedagogic scene itself. He thus resists conceiving of “a teaching without power, free from teaching’s own power effects or liberated from all power outside of or higher than itself ” (WP, 78–79). These remarks are relatively brief, but relate to Derrida’s later, more detailed discussion of philosophy’s relation to censorship and the State, which I discuss below.

In these three ways Derrida challenges the conceptions of the professor presupposed by his double opposition. The government reformers held the teacher to be purely representative, while the academic establishment idolized him as the embodiment of independent freedom. For Derrida, the philosophy professor fits neither of these images cleanly, being an impure combination of both sides of this coin.

In addition to teachers, the Haby reforms also concerned students. The proposed reduction in hours implied that an in-depth study of philosophy was inappropriate for students of a high school age. Arguing against this, the philosophical establishment clung to the traditional view, maintaining that in la Terminale the student was old enough to have been schooled in other disciplines, yet young enough to be open to philosophical instruction. Here too Derrida opposed both sides of the debate. While in favor of introducing philosophy into the primary school curriculum, his efforts focused on the teaching of philosophy in high school. (Others in GREPH explored teaching in primary schools, and extensive notes and transcripts from experimental philosophy classes taught in the fifth and sixth grades are contained in the collective 1977 volume Qui a peur de la philosophie?) The current system, Derrida argued, was woefully inadequate. Eight months was insufficient to advance in this subject being encountered in a certain way for the first time. But this was not to say that philosophy was wholly absent in a student’s prior education. For Derrida also claimed that students were learning philosophy well before la Terminale, since “the ‘philosophy’ of the dominant social forces has already done its work through the other disciplines.” Waiting until the final year was thus too late, and in Derrida’s eyes the philosophy being taught implicitly throughout high school was an “ideological impregnation” (WP, 161).

As a response, Derrida thus advocated extending the official teaching of philosophy across the final three years of high school. He supported his position by interrogating traditional assumptions on the role of age in philosophical education. This took place primarily in the 1977 essay “The Age of Hegel.” Here Derrida analyzes Hegel’s 1822 report to the Prussian State concerning the adequate preparation for students studying philosophy in the University. Hegel argues that in the Gymnasium students should study neither philosophy proper (“metaphysics”) nor the history of philosophy. Instead classics, dogmatic religion, empirical psychology, and formal logic are the appropriate preparatory training. This sequence matches Hegel’s own philosophy, a properly adult achievement that builds on these other fields. Hegel thus proposes that intellectual development follows a natural progression, an order he thinks is mirrored in the development of philosophy itself.

Derrida acknowledges the complexity of Hegel’s position, noting in particular that he sought to resist the State’s promotion of national character in education, and its emphasis on training for the professions and civil service. This resistance Derrida shares. Nonetheless, he is wary of Hegel’s proposed alternative endorsing the teaching of “general culture,” since such a notion “always remains highly determined in the contents it inculcates. Other forces of civil society manifest themselves here, and any analysis must be extremely vigilant in this regard” (WP, 144). Further, Derrida remains opposed to Hegel’s overall position, since his particular understanding of progress in philosophical education “puts in place the very structure against which we are struggling. One could say that it excludes all access to the practice of philosophy before the University” (WP, 145–146). That is, Derrida argues that Hegel’s view ultimately accords with the one advanced in the Haby reforms.

However, while opposing Hegel’s position on the age appropriate to the study of philosophy, Derrida also criticizes what seems to be an obvious alternative, that of Victor Cousin. Cousin argued in 1844 in favor of teaching metaphysics in schools, a view grounded in a belief in natural truths that are accessible to all by the Godgiven gift of human reason. And as mentioned above, Cousin’s discourse was used by those high in the French university hierarchy to oppose the Haby reforms. It is the recourse to nature, something Cousin shares with Hegel, which particularly concerns Derrida: “it is always by insisting upon the ‘natural,’ by naturalizing the content or the forms of instruction, that one ‘inculcates’ precisely what one wishes to exempt from criticism” (WP, 121). Further, Cousin agrees with the Hegelian view of philosophy as crowning the other disciplines (even as he rejects the need for a program of non-philosophical preparatory study), something Derrida also opposes.

Thus Derrida’s challenge is to justify the teaching of philosophy across the final three years of high school, without falling into the trap of an appeal to nature, or of seeing philosophy as the ultimate achievement of education as a whole. He does so by invoking a kind of progress in philosophy teaching, one “taken for granted in other disciplines,” as a “provisional strategic argument, borrowed from the logic of the adversary” (WP, 145). This is developed somewhat in “Philosophy and Its Classes,” a short article first appearing in 1975 in Le Monde de l’éducation. Here Derrida similarly invokes “the principle of a calculated progressivity,” and also aims to displace philosophy’s crowning position in proposing a reorganization of its relation to other disciplines. In particular, Derrida advocates bringing the discipline of philosophy into contact with the specific philosophies “already being taught through French literature, the languages, history, and even the sciences” (WP, 162). But these suggestions are brief and somewhat vague, and it should also be noted that Derrida soon switched to the language of “extension” rather than “progressivity,” in order to avoid some of the traditional connotations of the latter (WP, 112, 171).