Otogogy, or Friendship, Teaching and the Ear of the Other

Abstract

Beginning with Tony O'Connor's account of Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship in Crowley and Hegarty, Formless: Ways in and out of Form (2006), this paper argues that the philosophical history of friendship produces a constant return to issues of education and educational institutions. Employing Montaigne’s famous essay on the subject, along with Derrida’s account of friendship’s philosophical and political history, the paper asserts that the only effective defence against the currently dominant techno-scientific and bureaucratic re-structuring of the university system is an assertion (philosophical, political, but also literary) of the bodily metaphorics which found our understandings of disciplines such as Philosophy and Literary Studies. Such a position allows, then, for a timely reassessment of what friendship (between bodies and within bodies) might mean for those of us still working within such disciplinary bodies.