In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN a consideration of ethical possibilities as they exist as modes of relationality across difference in education. In my discussions of empathy, love, guilt, and listening, I have argued for an understanding of ethics that refuses to locate responsibility within a rational, autonomous subject but in the very forms of relationality that structure our encounters with other people, ones that are frequently infused with powerful feelings and emotions . In this regard, what counts as conditions of responsibility are therefore based in the quality of relations we have to others as opposed to adhering to predefined principles that we then apply to the particular situations in which we find ourselves. However, such an understanding of responsibility (or, more appropriately, of its conditions) poses some difficulties for teachers, for it does not seem to offer the security that codes or principles of ethics might. Moreover , it implicates all responses, including students’ responses to curriculum, in an unavoidable obligation that we may choose to disregard, but from which we cannot escape. Each of us, then, is therefore burdened with a responsibility for the Other that is not of our own making. Taking pedagogies of social justice as the point of my departure, my task has been to rethink the ethical basis of such responsibility through the complex ways we engage difference in the classroom. In arguing for seeing ethical relations as those that emerge out of a response to alterity, I claim here that we need to explore how certain affective attachments to difference create or disrupt nonviolent relations to the Other. My argument, therefore, has been that responsibility is not a singular position, behavior, skill, or attitude that one takes up in relation to a principle but is an approach to the Other born out of the uncertainty that a relation to another person carries. The emphasis I have placed on the risk, unpredictability, uncertainty, ambiguity, ambivalence, and spontaneity of our concrete relations creates a further difficulty for education, 141 POSTSCRIPT WHERE ARE ETHICAL POSSIBILITIES? for it seems to suggest that we cannot control and therefore act responsibly within prescribed ways of being. That is, if responsibility is located in those responses that allow us to learn from the Other, that challenge us to exceed ourselves, and that alter us in ways we could not have predicted, then what do teaching and learning have to do with responsibility? How do we avoid creating a climate of hopelessness when we say that treating others with the dignity they deserve is rooted in a nonintentional being-for the Other, particularly when the whole project of social justice education is based on such ethical promise? Where do ethical possibilities lie, and how might we think about making such possibilities less rare? These questions capture, it seems to me, two of the basic tensions arising in this work: first, that between our intentions to create and sustain relations of nonviolence and understanding that nonviolence does not arise out of intentionality ; and, second, that between our institutionally defined roles as teachers and students and the way our personal histories, affects, and meanings are played out through those interpersonal relations that exceed these roles. These tensions, perhaps, make plain what is so troubling about discussing an ethics of responsibility as a relation across difference, because it becomes immediately evident that what teachers intentionally teach does not necessarily lead to more or better opportunities for ethical interaction (either for them or their students ), and that in their relations, both with each other and to the curriculum, teachers and students are more than the predictable sum of their institutionally defined roles. Thus in seeing the conditions of responsibility in teaching as lying in surprising and unforeseeable encounters with difference, I am not suggesting here a list of principles that then can be codified and institutionalized through our teaching practice. Nor am I suggesting that we can ever fully prepare ourselves to be surprised by the strangeness of difference. What I am suggesting is a mindfulness and a sensitivity to the ways in which we participate in attending to difference within institutional contexts, on the one hand, and a vision of education as a practice that already participates in those conditions necessary for responsibility, on the other hand.Thus what I am proposing is an ethical orientation toward how we understand education more generally, and teaching and learning more specifically. Responsibility needs to be rethought in terms of the pull teachers and students experience between their institutional duties...

Share