Postulational Rhetoric and Presumptive Tautologies: The Genre of the Pedagogical, Negativity, and the Political

Abstract

In the paper I analyze two features of the genre of the pedagogical. First is a particular usage of “should” statements (which I call postulational rhetoric) where one can identify an effect of erasing present normative behavior, while that which is postulated is turned into an unattainable ideal, or a value. Second, I analyze “presumptive tautologies” in the discourse of aims of education. I focus on negative dimensions of these two features and, using theoretical insights from Laclau and Rancière, I connect them to the work of negativity in political ontology so that the relation between the pedagogical and the political can thus be re-articulated.