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.

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ADAM TENENBAUM

Postmodern Identities in Israel

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-

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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).

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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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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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ADAM TENENBAUM

economies in the most efficient and effective ways. There is no room for a counter
move, since it would just fall back into this abyss of absence.

There is no escape from the economies of violence. We are stranded in the

metaphysical space of the will to power, in the face of the death of god. We do not
yet know of any other essence of metaphysics and still belong to this last essence.
All education appropriated by the will to power does not belong to the essence
of metaphysics. Education has to remain in the indecision between the truth of
discourse, the economies of violence, and the lack of essence.

Each animal lives in the danger to which its dark drives expose it. Man is

exposed to danger since he is estranged to his primordial being. Man goes along
with his drive to transcend and reaches even beyond life. He is courageous beyond
life, but just in moderate measure. The will to power leads him beyond life. This
transcendence grants his drives clarity, and this disclosure purifies his will to power.
The disclosure does not disconnect him from life nor from his drives, nor from the
dark element of his being. The more man appropriates his disclosure, the more
clarity he acquires over his will to power. At the same time, it seems that the
economy of pure forces is clarified in its struggle. However, the result is a harsher
sliding into the darkness of courage and life.

Responsibility and the Economies of Violence

The assignment of a responsibility can be done within a calculative economy,
or within an economy, which goes beyond calculation.

9

Modernity adheres to a

responsibility based on an idea, on freedom, on a discourse within reason and by
reason. Can the postmodern educator maintain any kind of authority? Modernity is
devoted to ideas of universality, which replaced authority external to the individual
with a lawfulness, which he legislated to himself within his own internal being.
The modern individual has taken upon him the tasks to obey the idea of universal
humanity, to implement freedom, to conduct the discourse of reason, to strive for
the achievement of a consensus, to partake in the happiness of all. These tasks
were established with the goal of full development of his resources, emotional and
intellectual.

10

The modern individual had to adjust his inner violence, his passions

and small contingencies. He subjected himself to a process of normalization in
which all these phenomena had to obey the laws of reason and the ideas of free-
dom, which he had taken upon himself to legislate. He was supposed to develop a
responsible self. Responsibility had to grow out of the normalized self. He had to
be responsible for his own normalization.

11

The modern educator was responsible for the proper flow of normalization and

for the true development of a rational self. He was responsible for a dialogue
of reason with itself, in which all unreasonableness had to be enlightened by a
critique.

A philosophy of difference has to escape the reign of infinite representation. It

is a horrifying thought. The philosophy of difference does not obey the indifferent,

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375

the undifferentiated. It is not absorbed within the false movement of the negative.
Difference is affirmation itself. Affirmation is itself difference. This claim may lead
to seeing difference everywhere, treating any difference with respect, or reconciling
all differences or entering into a treaty of federation between them, “while history
continues to be made through bloody contradictions.”

12

How can we escape this

deadlock between, on the one hand, the violent history of the infinite idea and,
on the other hand, the lack of truth in non-violent differences? Which is the true
perspective on violence? Can the philosophy of difference mark which violences
are unavoidable or, if avoidable, yet beneficial to the cause. Deleuze distinguishes
between two kinds of necessary destruction, which may coincide within a mo-
ment of history. The poet, “who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable
of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm difference.” And
the politician, who denies any difference which may serve as an obstacle to the
conservation or the establishment of an historical order.

13

The conclusion to be drawn is to develop a sense for cruelty (for the right

application of violence), and to form a taste for destruction (abolishing obstacles).

Responsibility has to take another form. The postmodern educator has to learn

to manage in a different manner the violences he applies to his disciple and the
violences with which the disciple responds. The task is not to prepare the utopia of
non-violence.

14

Neither is the task to normalize all citizens for that purpose, nor

to make them aware of the unreasonable forces of the spheres of economy, politics
and society. Rather, within all the violences whose traces keep haunting modernity
and within all the violences of normalization modernity itself keeps inventing at
ever greater speeds, the task is to learn to cope within the economy of violence
and suffering, on all external and internal plateaus. The postmodern educator has
no choice but to immerse himself with his disciple into the violences of history.
He has to make his disciple suffer through the process of learning to identify and
cope with them, and to make him go through a violent process of self-formation
for which he can present no justification. The postmodern educator has to put his
disciple through a suffering without providing him with the authority or idea of
a telos, of a salvation, of freedom. All he can strive for is an honesty and clarity,
which he cannot guarantee, nor can he explicate their value and meaning.

15

Together with Nietzsche he has to apply the grand maxim, that true learning

comes through the suffering, but true suffering will reveal the lack of justification
for itself. The true principle of a postmodern education was already given in the
formula: anything, which can be subjected to violence, is also worthy of this sub-
jection of violence. He must make the other suffer for there is no other form of
education. The style can be a style of dialogue, a style of an open conversation, a
regulated and lawful transmission of tasks and values.

Negation can produce an affirmation, can award meaning and value (reality)

to a negated phenomenon, to a reactive phenomenon, to a conservative kind of
violence (which produces a destructive terror). “Affirmation is indeed produced,
but in order to say yes to all that is negative and negating, to all that can be

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ADAM TENENBAUM

denied.”

16

This is a suffering, which is a burden. It may be exemplified by the

difference between taking revenge and a state of being absorbed by revenge. This
is a difference between the strength to affirm an empty concept at the right moment
and to abolish an empty concept at the most awful moment (when all strength to
affirm is vanished). For example, a marriage can be dissolved if you expose its
emptiness as its truth at the moment of your highest strength; or it can deteriorate
at the moment when your inner truth has deteriorated completely (being absorbed
with revenge for a long time has eaten you up from inside). “Zarathustra’s Ass says
yes, but for him to affirm is to bear, to assume or to shoulder a burden.”

17

This is a

perspective in which nothing escapes from functioning as a burden: divine values,
human values, absence of values.

The crucial junctions of such transactions will always involve a violent breaking

up of assumptions, truths, and values. Not for the sake of the true assumptions, the
true truths, the true meetings and values, but just for the sake of making them
tremble. Violence is not the supplement to the transactions of meaning and values,
but the raison d’être. One should not, of course, make the opposite assumption, that
dialogue becomes the supplement of violence. The discourse of violence is subject
to such supplementary moves, but also avoids them.

Every other form of education is a form of subjection or a form of responsibility

to the community of rational reason, of selves, to God, to the other. It is a matter of
choice; or rather a discourse between choices, and between them and the violences
appearing behind their backs, or supplementing the choices even when no sup-
plementation was intended. All forms of responsibility are now in suspension, are
only supplementary. It is not a matter of absolute responsibility, especially since
absolute responsibility is not a responsibility within a calculating reason, nor a
general responsibility. We have to account for something, if we are responsible,
but if it is truly our responsibility then there can be no meaning behind it, but
just absolute singularity and silence. All forms of education were subject to this
double obligation: to an economy and to a God, even if God is just a name for the
uniqueness of my interiority not visible on the plane of exteriority.

Responsibility for making the other suffer, for applying violence to him, has

to give up on this idea of God. It has to handle its other economy on a plane
of exteriority subject to a process of purification, of taking leave of an absolute
interiority visible to God. There is no more such responsibility, no more such guilt,
and no more such economy of violence absorbed within the discourse of reason.

It is a matter of playing with meanings and values, of attaining new degrees

of freedom within different forms of freedom, but there is no guiding thread on
the plane of interiority, or on the plane of generality. There is no isle of peace
for humanity, nor humanity destined for a peaceful existence. This idea means the
greatest violence, the most metaphysical violence, beyond ontology and beyond
the phenomenology of violences.

We always act; we always apply values and meanings. Values and meanings,

within a space “polluted” by violences always enact us. The dream of modernity

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ANTI-HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES FOR A POSTMODERN EDUCATOR

377

was a purified space (an enlightened space). This was just another form, another
degree of violence. It was the last violence against the plane of exteriority in the
name of a pure interiority. It was the last realization of Christianity. We are the
subjects of this command. We were supposed to dispose of all violences “pollut-
ing” our enlightened space. We apply violences on different planes to create this
obligation. Dismantling this obligation would mean a first step beyond modern
education, beyond the gaze governing our enlightened space. Do not mistake this
with a call for all contingent (honorable or racist) violences to raise their heads
and grant them legitimacy. The ontology of violence supporting postmodern edu-
cation has to beware of not falling back into pre-modern violences nor granting
the violences born within the project of modernity a too honorable status. On the
contrary, the ontology set to decipher the violences of history may support the more
efficient elimination of all violences with which the violence of modernity could
not cope, especially if it was responsible for their emergence and for granting them
a marginal space of subsistence. For instance within the ideal assumption that a
dialogue, or a communicative reason is possible (that a struggle is possible which
leads to less violence, a struggle without the application of force, within a neutral
space, under the gaze of enlightening and enlightened reason).

18

The quest for truth, morality and authenticity may be supplemented by ideas of

a pure race, a pure nation, and a pure community. Purified truths may be supple-
mented by polluted truths. The postmodern condition might just turn out to be a
more efficient struggle directed against all such truths: pure and polluted. We can
no longer know in advance on whose side of history the pure and polluted truths
reside. We must learn to grant ontological weight to any violence, which serves the
ontology of the age or the present. Granting the wrong weights may just lead to a
bad interpretation, or to a different ontology. Thought cannot choose its alliances
and cannot avoid being drafted unto the wrong, whether pure or polluted, truths.

We moderns operate within an open society and allow any one to enter our

space of discourse under the assumption that the struggles within that space are
handled without the use of manifest violence. We let the other enter our space, but
we do not listen to his violence. We activate “non-violent” forces, rhetorical and
symbolic, semiotic and pragmatic; in order to mark positions for the other within
our space. We delegate the other to the illegitimate or to the margins, we allow him
to enter his voice into our discourse of humanity but we do not honor his voice if
it is marked thus. We are obliged to reason in order to censor any other one who
is less obliged. We marginalize in the name of reason and humanity, and apply a
variety of violences to purify them or at least to make them remain marginalized.
We detest open violences, violences performed in the name of the father, or in the
name of honor, or in the name of God. We prefer our violences of reason, our
violences of history, our violences of metaphysics. And we are very efficient in
making our violences rule, and eradicating all other ones.

If at this moment of modernity, we relieve ourselves of the claims for universal

reason, if we let reason pause, this is mainly an effect of its overall victory. Reason

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ADAM TENENBAUM

has become so dominant over all other forms of values and meanings that we allow
ourselves to send her to the backstage. We are ready to give up on the idea of
universal humanity, on the cause of a unified hegemony, since the world has been
stripped of its various humanities. The humanities on earth have been neutralized of
their metaphysics, of their truths, of their violences. We are learning to speak one
language of violence (masquerading as the language of non-violence). This lan-
guage enables us to eradicate all traces of violence, which still insist on remaining
a reality.

We allow multi-culturalism to dance on the stage, since in the backstage we run

the violences of history just like a puppet on a string. Our ideal space of discourse
has become strong enough. There is no need even for the celebrated balance of
powers. There are no more essential forces able to interfere. All serve the effi-
ciency of the One Hegemony. No one can really interrupt. We have in principle
neutralized all essential violences; we have dried out all alternative realities. As
only one violence is in reign, as only one reality is valid, we let all harmless traces
of alternative violences, of alternative realities put on their dance for our gaze.
It is the gaze of the cave of tourism, and not the cave of absolute goodness. We
are generous to all cultures, since they have all been seduced into our cave.

19

Any

minority or any culture which would demand to implement its essence including its
manifest and hidden violences: they will be held down with no hesitation and with
no regrets. (Police, law, education, social welfare, media, psychology: all serve as
the means for dealing with all aspects of violence; no dimensions to escape, except
for harmless religious sects.) In the name of humanity, reason and universality we
clear our space and disqualify any engagement in the name of the father or the
family. We may kill for humanity’s sake, but not for the sake of the father. Does
this mean that our violence has become matriarchal? Does femininity govern our
violence, and have feminine violences come back to rule our lives? In the name of
the mother? Or is this still a patriarchal form of questioning violences?

The responsibility of the postmodern educator refers to choices made between

different forms and different degrees of forces. He places his disciple within frames
of meaning and values, which force upon him a variety of modes of suffering. The
suffering is always the one proper to him. He appropriates what is proper to him.
There is no proper suffering in itself. What one suffers is what one should suffer.
The subject of joy suffers from his joy. The subject of pity suffers from his pity.
And the subject of the avoidance of suffering at all costs suffers precisely from this
avoidance.

The responsibility is not to the genius, nor to the earth. It does not seek to

reduce or to enhance joy or suffering. Rather, it has to upset all economies, to
make all economies of suffering and joy suffer at their economy. One has to create
a commitment to the proper violence, to the proper decisions, to the proper joy and
suffering. One has to suffer from the lack of violence, and be violent against the
lack of suffering. One has to enjoy the economies of violence, and apply violences
against the overflowing of joys.

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Today, violence is directed against the human-all-too-human ideals of humanity,

and against the ones obsessed with violence, ready to use it against anyone not
fitting their categories. It is a violence against the ones too comfortable with reason
and against the ones who believe in a too easy solution for escaping reason. The
violences against and on behalf of reason have to be weighed within the econom-
ies of reason and within the economies of non-reason, within the economies of
responsibility and outside the economies of responsibility. There is no easy going
decision between the economies of responsibility and the economies of violence.
The absolute readiness to purify society of violence and the pure obsessions with
violence must be met within a proper responsibility to suffering and to joy, to values
and meaning, to violence and non-violence. There is no absolute rationalization of
violence, neither on the side of pure reason nor on the side of pure violence.

Each one shall earn the violences and sufferings that he deserves. We get the

values and meanings proper to these decisions made. We develop the responsib-
ilities proper to our violences of history, and the violences of history demand the
proper responsibilities.

We apply to each disciple the proper kinds of sufferings and joys that he de-

serves. There is no model. There are no prescriptions. An age, which adores pre-
scriptions, has formed an alarming picture of education, reason and violences. Even
when it turns to the models which declare the non-availability of prescriptions, of
concepts, or even of the proper questions. Even the classical example of the Zen
disciple, who has to spend years of education in order to learn not only to drop his
expectations for an answer from his mentor but also to give up on the question, can
be interpreted in two ways. It may serve as a model of education for the revocability
of thought in general, and the obsession with seeking an answer to a question in
particular. It may also serve as a model for the necessity of the path of thought and
questioning for the disciple, since this has lead him to the place where thought and
questioning have become expandable. Kafka’s story of the keeper of the law works
on similar grounds. There is no model, but you have to tire yourself out at your own
gate to come to an understanding of the difficulty to receive a true answer from the
law.

Derrida on Responsibility

Derrida attempts a clarification of the concept of responsibility within an analysis
of the infinitely other as god (religion) and the infinitely other as another human
(ethics). He refers us back to the tensions between religion and ethics as delimited
in Kierkegaard and Levinas. The religious is also ethical, since it involves respon-
sibility to the other (human) as absolute singularity. The ethical is also religious
since there is no conceptual difference between the infinite alterity of god and that
of every human. The conclusion is paradoxical. The concept of responsibility (to
the absolute other in his otherness and to the other other in his absoluteness) lacks
coherence and identity, and yet it functions.

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The concept of responsibility relates to a secret (it relates to god or to the ab-

solute other). At the same time it takes us dangerously close to irresponsibility. Or
even worse it brings us into a terrifying closeness to the devil. Thus the innocence
of responsibility is mixed with absolute terror. Can we assume that the devil is
responsible for himself? To himself?

An experience of the sacred, of secrecy, of the absolute other thus involves

the possibility of a “demonic rupture”. Whenever the devil is involved there is an
effect of demolishing responsibility. Can anyone be held responsible for a demonic
rupture? Who is responsible for the devil, for a most demonic evil, for an absolute
evil? The devil himself? Who can name the devil? God? I? The other? Can the
other as the victim of an absolute evil name the devil? Who is able to name an
absolute evil?

20

The postmodern educator cannot take responsibility for an absolute evil. There

is no absolute evil to name, and yet he can take responsibility for this impossibility.
Our time is impoverished time since it lacks not only the presence of god, but
worse, it lacks the meaning of this absence. God does not assemble us into his
presence or into his absence. There is no more room for the radiance of godliness.
There is no time-space for naming the absence of the absolute. This lack is the
abyss.

There is no trace to be traced out of the abyss. No ethics and no religions stand

outside. There is no tracing of the absolute within this abyss. There is no name for
the demonic. Yet responsibility calls. Even if it tempts us into terrifying closeness
to irresponsibility. And we cannot name a substitute for the absolute. Ethics do
not replace religion, as little as did socialism. Nor does the will to power. The
will to power is the last metaphysical principle, which has to teach us to remain
in the abyss. The will to power does not replace god, but marks the traces within
the abyss. It is a principle, which traces out all principles and marks the turning
away from all metaphysical principles. It marks the obligation of thinking to meta-
physical principles and names the task for weakening that obligation. We do not
yet have a name for the other obligation. We are still in the abyss, and are still
responsible for this strange lack of obligation interlaced with the obligation to the
absolute (other). We develop a sensitivity for this kind of responsibility, for the
groundless possibilities, lacking a concept, lacking possibility.

The absolute cannot return. Man has not prepared him a space-time within the

abyss. Within the abyss only a lightning of divinity may reach us, and may trace
the path for another (proper) time-space for the absolute. The dark times of the
abyss are long, and the absence of divinity prevents the naming of the absolute.
We do not even know how to name this absence. The absolute absence of god has
withdrawn its absence from the abyss of human thought. We have no name for the
nameless suffering on earth. The infinite suffering cannot be named and does not
mark a path out of the impoverished times. On the contrary, all names for suffering
reinforce the lack of godliness. All names for infinite suffering turn nameless.

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The educator has no route to escape from this terrifying responsibility. The im-

possible responsibility, the nameless suffering, and the lack of divinity, has received
a name: Auschwitz.

What is the demonic within the abyss of the death of god? It cannot just signify a

confusion of the “limits among the animal, the human and the divine”. If we do not
live any longer under the obligation to keep the divine pure, if god is dead within
our thinking and possibilities, are we justified in assuming a pure definition of the
demonic? Is the demonic just the interruption of violence into the sphere of rational
discourse, the discourse of liberties, of the social contracts? Do these ethical-
political and ethical-theological interruptions obey the same economy? To which
economy does Auschwitz belong? Or does it transcend these economies? All eco-
nomies of evil? What would such a transcendence mean within the impoverished
age of the abyss?

Derrida does not resign from the task. He sets out upon a path to reinforce the

coherence of the possibility that an absolute singularity may serve as “an irredu-
cible condition” for an analysis of responsibility.

21

What would it mean to dispose

of such a condition? Would this lead to a worse violence? To an irresponsibility of
thinking? To a blind obedience, to an irresponsible obedience? Would this obliga-
tion still enforce its violence, but blindly and in an irresponsible manner? Which
would be more closer to the devil: blind obedience to this condition, reinforcement
of this condition, or gods beware disposing of it? Is this where the name for the
evil irresponsibility would lie?

Maybe this is the most dangerous and most obliging task for thinking: going

beyond any transcendental and ontological violence may lead to the most dan-
gerous obedience to an onto-theological violence, and thus would lead to a most
dangerous irresponsibility enforcing an absolute evil. And responsibility of think-
ing and education may demand taking precisely this route in close neighborhood of
the demonic secret, the orgiastic sacred, the banality of evil and the irresponsibility
of uncontrollable irruptions. Obeying the demand for securing the paths may be just
as evil as the uncontrollable evils falling upon us from within and from without the
godless abyss.

“Religion” would be the name for integrating the secret of the sacred, orgiastic

or demonic mystery into the sphere of responsibility. This is a form of subjecting
the irresponsible eruption to the subject of responsibility. Can we retain responsi-
bility, can we remain the subject of responsibility, after giving up on the project of
the wholly and infinite other? What would remain of the subject of responsibility?
What would remain of responsibility? Will the demonic return? Has it not already
returned? Has the demonic mystery ever been subjected? Has it paid the price for
its subjection or will we have to pay the price for its uncontrollable return? Can
we wish for its return, for its conquest of our present? Can the tracing of the abyss
allow us to distinguish, purely, between the return of the evil and the preparation for
divinity? Should we really wish to be delivered of the demonic and remain in the
abyss? Would this not be the most demonic form of humanism, the most lacking

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of divinity, and thus of humanity? Is there a responsible form for the possibility of
the return of the demonic? If religion served as the passage to responsibility, do we
not stand before the passage to another responsibility, a return of the demonic?

The whole history of modernity is a response to the possibility of a return of

the demonic. The project(s) of modern education is a multi-track effort to hide the
possibility of the return of the demonic. The normalization of the subject had to
become the sacred secret of modern identity, and thus prevent the secrecy of the
demonic from interrupting. Is Auschwitz the return of the demonic? One response
of the demonic to the banality of normalization, and thus corrupted. The demonic
normalized within its banality has become a most horrifying evil, nameless and
thoughtless. Does this demonic still hide the possibility for the true demonic to
erupt, thus destroying all banality, including the banality of evil. Will any attempt
to mark the escape routes from normalization be infected, polluted by the banality
of its own evils? Will any violence interfering with the efficiency of modern nor-
malization be struck by the evil of banality? By the demonic? By the banality of
evil? Are we doomed forever to obey the faceless evils of banality? Will no divinity
erupt to save us from this faceless demonic?

The secret of responsibility would consist of keeping secret, or ‘incorporated’,
the secret of the demonic and thus of preserving within itself a nucleus of
irresponsibility or of absolute unconsciousness (The gift of death, p. 20).

The Sensitivities of Violence

The task of a postmodern education is not only to enhance the differences between
perspectives, not only to teach the logos of perspectivity, but also to develop a
new set of sensitivities. These must not only cope with a variety of violences, but
also acquire a new status. The genitive is a double one: the sensitivites belong
to violences, and they are applied to them. We must learn a new joussaince of
violence: from and to, on behalf of and on the costs of violences. This requires
the development of sensitivities in the service of violences and sensitive to the
implications of such services. When we develop programs striving to impose non-
violent behavior, we create a certain kind of sensitivity to violence, but we impose
a castration of a variety of sensitivities on behalf of the violence of normalization.
We develop blind spots and we become blind to our refusal to confront this blind
spot. To protect this blindness we develop a set of unnoticeable violences (the worst
kind?) which enable us to avoid any noticeable violence. There is no hermeneutics
of blind spots in the case of this strange economy of violence; there are no truths
to be discovered. This confrontation has not yet acquired a learnable form of cop-
ing. We have yet to learn the secrets of enjoying the sufferings which life and its
violence produce for us.

There is no rationalization of violence. We have to direct our energies against

all possible phenomena. There is no phenomenology of all violences. There is no

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concept, which may absolve us of the unending task of dealing with the violences
of history and self. Nor do we have a route to escape to a purified singularity.
The task of education is to teach another discourse of violence, a non-discourse, a
discourse, which may well be going beyond discourse and singularity. It is a matter
of finding the appropriate otherness, which the other cannot love, which he must
detest. He must learn to detest himself for not being able to love the otherness; he
must learn to love himself while detesting the otherness of the other. The decision
is not between the ego and the other, not between the self and the absolute other,
but between the self and his ego: what kind of violences should I and must I love,
and what kind should I and must I detest? There is no concept waiting at the telos,
nor an absolute singularity at the arche. The violences of history demand merely to
make the proper decisions proper to them: to continue history, to continue the logos
of violences and the violences of the logos, to learn the enhancement of strengths
and of sensitivities (to history, to violences, to reason).

Notes

1

See Tamir, Y.: 1995, Giroux, H. and Mclaren, P.: 1994.

2

The definitons which Nietzsche drops on so many places regarding a morality of activity of noble

subjects, seem to contradict the possibility of subjecthood: one can be a subject only if one produces
a reactive morality, a morality based on guilt. No guilt, no subjecthood. Less guilt, less responsibility,
less subjecthood.

3

The force of morality applied to violence is itself a kind of violence. We never escape violence,

but rather apply one kind of violence against another kind. The interesting question to be developed
is which perspective is the most true to the ontology of violence, which is the most economical and
most ethical. We can never assume that the Good or goodness is on one side of the ethical, within a
certain kind of economy as opposed to another kind.

4

See Gur-Zeev, I.: ‘Toward a non-repressive Critical Pedagogy’, Educational Theory 48, 463–486.

Gur-zeev acknowledges the need for the disclosure of violence, but is still committed to “a negative
utopianism, in which the only possible appearance of justice is in the presence of its absence, in the
acknowledgment of the violence of its negation” (p. 482). The possibility that all there is in being
(whether present or absent) are violences is taken into account, but an insistence on the impossible
possibility of a non-repressive transcendence withholds the final tumbling down of the utopian pro-
ject.

5

For a profound discussion of the concept see Deleuze, G.: 1994, Difference and Repetition, Columbia

University Press, p. 128. For a more popular discussion of this concept see Baudrillard, J.: 1994,
Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press.

6

This is not to be confused with a version of counter-education. I do not deny all versions of

educational violence but call for a more appropriate analytic of violence before any analysis of
the practices of violence can claim an outside which enables holding a ground for refusal. Even
if counter-education does acknowledge the all-penetrating prescence of power and violence, it falls
into the illusion that a struggle over the possibilities of non-repressive critical dialogue is feasible.
The ethics of violence does not assume that it can be decided in advance of the struggle over the
possibility of a dialogue, who is on the abstract side of negation and who is on the concrete side.
This is just another type of handling the economy of violence by claiming to know who is inside the
dialogue and who is still captivated on the outside. Any why should this type of violence know to be
better, or know where the utopian moment of non-repression shall fall? See Mclaren, P.: 1994.

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ADAM TENENBAUM

7

Only the educator who assumes that he can somehow escape this lack in divinity will also find an

antagonism between obedience and sensitivity.

8

See Heidegger, Martin: 1950, Holzwege, Klostermann Verlag, p. 253.

9

Only Christianity managed to interiorize responsibility and thus put the individual in an absolute

tension between his modes of calculative reason and his modes of absolute devotion to God.

10

See Rousseau, J. J.: Emil. This is a classical text, which establishes the ethos of normalizing the

modern individual.

11

There is already a variety of violences in Rousseau’s concept of education. Education, for Rousseau,

has to transform itself from an ideological tool serving the enslavement of humanity to a medium
of freedom serving the morality in a society founded on reason. The natural state serves as a point
of reference for the possibility of freedom without society, and thus without violence. The devel-
opment of society and its variety of emotions lead to the installment of ideological forces serving
the violences needed for the operation of a society based on inequality and serving narrow interests
within the social and political realm. A true society founded on reason and on universal humanity will
employ violence in order to suppress all forces doing essential harm to the social contract. Education
is a process, which shapes a disciple who detests the employment of violence for narrow causes
but loves the violence serving the general cause. Education produces the sentiments needed for the
identification with the violence of a general will, and enabling the individual to side with reason.

In the natural state only the violence of death is to be feared. However, nature has provided all

creatures with the voice of pity, which forms a natural morality to cope with the value and mean-
ing of death. Death being the highest violence, compassion prevents any creature from employing
unnecessary violence. No violence leads unto death. Only the institution of social relations leads to
the formation of interests guarded by sentiments, which produce violence unto death. The defense of
interests can lead to the death of the other who threatens those interests. Rousseau gives us a solution
leading to freedom via the road of violence serving to normalize all reasonable citizens.

12

Deleuze, G.: Difference and Repetition, p. 52.

13

Deleuze, G.: Difference and Repetition, p. 53.

14

See Aloni, Nimrod: 1998, For Human Sake. Ways of Humanistic Education, Hakibbutz Hemeuchad

Tel-aviv, ch. 3 (Hebrew).

15

There have been quite a few attempts to provide existentialist or humanist alternatives to the state

of nihilism. The major problem in such alternatives remains the issue how to ‘explicate’ the concept
of authenticity.

16

Deleuze, G.: Difference and Repetition, p. 53.

17

ibid.

18

See Habermas, Jürgen: 1981, Theorie der Kommunikativen Handlung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.

19

The world is even marked and mapped into regions which have completely given in to the seduc-

tion and some which still have not come to terms with remains and traces of obstructive violences,
which interfer with the efficiency of keeping the space purified.

20

Derrida, J.: The Gift of Death, p. 61, 68.

21

Derrida, J.: The Gift of Death, p. 91–92.

References

Gur-Zeev, I.: 1998, ‘Toward a non-represive Critical Pedagogy’, Educational Theory 48, 463–486.
Deleuze, G.: 1994, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, New York.
Baudrillard, J.: 1994, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press.
Heidegger, M.: 1950, Holzwege, Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt.
Aloni, N.: 1998, For Human Sake. Ways of Humanistic Education (Hebrew), Hakibbutz Hemeuchad,

Tel-aviv.

Habermas, J.: 1981, Theorie der Kommunikativen Handlung, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.

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ANTI-HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES FOR A POSTMODERN EDUCATOR

385

Derrida, J.: 1995, The Gift of Death, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Giroux, H. and Mclaren, P. (eds.): 1994, Between borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural

Studies, Routledge, New York.

Tamir, Y.: 1995, ‘Two concepts of Multiculturalism’, Journal of Philosophy and Education 29, 161–

172.

Address for correspondence: Adam Tenenbaum, P.B. 641, Even-Yehuda 40500, Israel
(E-mail: [e-mail])

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