The Uses of Spirit: Notes on Derrida,Spiritual Politics,and Educational Leadership

Abstract

This article focuses on a critical reading of two texts by Derrida: Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1989) and Memoirs of the Blind (1993). In these two texts, Derrida explores some of the dominant tropes and metaphors of a language of spirit in two distinctively different, but interrelated, genealogies in the West: one in philosophy and one in religion. Derrida's interest was to show how the same language can be, and has been, made to serve very different purposes. In this article, the author argues that a language of “spirit” can serve as a powerful tool in democratic educational leadership by providing an ethical grounding and a heading for change. At the same time, educational leaders who invoke a language of spirit should do so with a keen sense of the undemocratic uses to which such language has been linked—linkages to systems of racial class, gender, sexual, and other oppression.

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