Beyond the Modern-Postmodern Struggle in Education: Toward Counter-Education and Enduring Improvisation

This book is an attempt to historically and conceptually address the present human condition and the current specific role of education as a distinctively creative symbolic violence. In doing so, the book reevaluates the various manifestations and conflicting alternatives to normalizing education. The author suggests a unique, Diasporic, counter-education that transcends modern politics, postmodern philosophical assumptions and spiritual telos towards an impetus for the re-birth of what the author refers to as the "enduring improviser". It is a first step towards a new critical language that addresses the challenges of globalizing capitalism, of the cyberspace, of racism and of the new antisemitism that springs from postcolonialism. The book calls for a creative rearticulation of the relations between the aesthetic, the ethical, the intellectual and the bodily dimensions of the cosmos and human life. It is an invitation for a new Diasporic religiosity, one which turns courageously towards the exile of the gods. It addresses the ever-strengthening-and-tempting-sophistication of the anti-humanistic dimensions of "our" postmodern pleasure machine, of pre-modern "redemption" projects and of modern deceiving offers for "emancipation". The book is of special relevance for students of critical sociology, critical philosophy, Jewish philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies, education - and for all friends of the free spirit.