Teaching the Other/Writing the Other: Derrida and the Ethics of the Ethnographic Text

Abstract

This article examines the educational implications of this focus by presenting a re-reading of Derrida's reading of the non-ethical aftermath of the sign, or what is a cultural and pedagogical by-product of the epistemic value of a phonological theory of signification and the notion of an interpretative community of speech. This type of unforgiving logocentrism, carried on in the tradition of the teachings of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is effectively questioned here by counter-posing its 'linearist'−both structural and metaphysical−premises of representation as predicated on the voice, against the most crucial elements of the post-structural version of difference or the idea of the play of the sign of the writing of the Other. Thus are set the argumentative preconditions through which to 'test' the theoretical matrix of deconstruction and what it has brought to bear on the practical domain of the disciplinary areas of the application of structuralism within the 'social' or 'human sciences'. The example considered within this contextual site of praxis is Derrida's reading of 'The Writing Lesson' to be found in Claude-Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques , an ethnological master text representative of the 'Age of Rousseau', the epoch of the founding of modern anthropology. By expanding upon the ethico-political dimensions of the deconstruction of the ethnocentrism of the representation of the Nambikwara given, the present article renders an interpretation of Derrida's reading of the intersubjective violence characterizing the cultural politics of the sign in light of the politology of a structuralist 'educational' agenda dismissive of script.