Introduction Inclusion appears currently to be characterised by confusion about what it is supposed to be and do, frustration at the way the current climate of standards and accountability constrains teachers' work, guilt at the exclusion created for individual pupils and exhaustion associated with a sense of failure and futility. The paper considers the 'impossibility' of inclusion in the current context and the way in which it has become a highly emotive and somewhat irrational space of confrontation for teachers and government and for researchers and scholars in which questions about how we should include appear to be displaced by questions about why we should include and under what conditions. An attempt is made to rescue inclusion from its 'valedictory state' and to reframe it as an ongoing struggle and as a more productive form of political engagement. This reframing takes some of the key ideas of the philosophers of difference -of Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Foucault - and puts them to work on the inclusion 'problem'. The impossibility of inclusion Questions raised by teachers unions about whether inclusive education can realistically be achieved have emanated from concerns about teachers being unprepared for inclusion (Macmillan et al, 2002; Edmunds 2003) and about the 'collision course' between high stakes testing programmes and inclusion (NEA, 2005, internet source). Researchers report that teachers are increasingly talking about inclusive education as an impossibility in the current climate (Croll and Moses, 2000; Thomas and Vaughan, 2004) and lack confidence in their own competence to teach inclusively (Mittler, 2000; Hanko, 2005). Within the United States, well-meaning and dedicated teachers who were previously willing to include disabled children in their classroom have begun to refuse them because of concerns that their low test scores would have a negative effect on their own school careers (Harvey-Koelpin, 2006). A dramatic U-turn by the so called architect of inclusion in the UK, Mary Warnock (2005), who describes inclusion as a 'disastrous legacy' (p22), appears to have validated some of the resistance from teachers and others and made the refusal of inclusion legitimate and acceptable. Whilst commentators have speedily demonstrated the ignorant and offensive nature of Warnock's comments (Barton, 2005), this 'stunning recantation … by a respected figure' (Hansard, 22 June 2005, Col 825) has clearly had an influence. Rethinking inclusion: the philosophers of difference in practice Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Foucault, along with Irigary, Kristeva, Lyotard and others, have been recognised as philosophers of difference because of their concern with achieving the recognition of minority social groups and their attempt to formulate a politics of difference which is based on an acceptance of multiplicity (Patton, 2000). Each of these writers have in common an orientation to philosophy as a political act and a will to make use of philosophical concepts as a form, not of global revolutionary change, but of 'active experimentation, since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn' (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, p137). Their work is a philosophy of affirmation which is a 'belief of the future, in the future' (Deleuze, quoted in Rajchman, 2001, p76) and is intended to lighten and provide release. This use of philosophy is a departure from the 'science as usual' (Harding, 1991, p1) mentality which dominates education and considerations of inclusion. It does not offer solutions, but rather produces new concepts, 'provocation' (Bains, 2002) and new imaginings 'which crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down partitions, co-extensive with the world' (Deleuze, 1994, p22). A number of key ideas of the philosophers of difference are identified as capable of being put to work on inclusion. Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome is viewed as a more open and dynamic way of thinking about learning and inclusion. Deterritorialization offers a mechanism for dismantling the rigid, striated and hierarchical spaces, for example in schools, which produce exclusion. The process of deterritorialization involves becoming foreigners in our own tongue, and creating stutterings over words and expressions which have hitherto been familiar; a refusal of essences or signifieds; creative subtraction, in which decisions are made about what not to do; and an acceptance that there is no-one behind expression. An alternative construction of difference rejects the link with contradiction and negation and presents instead an affirmative difference, forcing the majority to examine their own standard. A more revolutionary notion of becoming provides scope for transforming old (perhaps special education) habits into new forms of existence and foregrounds desire.Derrida's deconstruction is considered invaluable as a means of identifying how impossibilities become inscribed within documents and how the rush to make recommendations and to act create closure, exclusion and injustice. The function of deconstruction is to disrupt the decidability of documents and reveal how exclusion is produced within them by the imperative to reach a decision. Whilst much of deconstruction has been denounced as negative and deconstructive, it is argued that its purpose is to ensure justice through the identification of aporias, double contradictory imperatives. These are productive kinds of impossibilities in which one's responsibility to the other is necessarily contingent, continuous and incomplete and produced by a deconstruction which is profoundly ethical. The aporias which exist within schools are discussed and an attempt is made to illustrate how these can be exposed through deconstruction. Consideration is also given to how policy recommendations could be produced in ways that acknowledge competing agendas, such as high stakes testing and inclusion, and without being on a 'collision course' (NEA, 2005).Foucault's constructs of power and knowledge are recognised as having a value in exposing the processes of hierarchical surveillance and subjectification within which inclusion, and all those associated with it, are imbricated. It is argued, however, that it is his work on ethics, which has considerable relevance, and prospects, for inclusion. The elements of Foucault's framework of ethics - the determination of the ethical substance, the mode of subjection, self-practice or ethical work and the telos - are outlined. Determining the ethical substance, the part of teachers' selves and their schools to be worked on is undertaken as a group activity, starting in confessional mode in which participants reveal some aspect of their practice which has restricted inclusion. The mode of subjection is identified by examining their own school context and their experiences of exclusion and regulation. Teachers' self practice or ethical work focuses on making their classroom practice more inclusive but also on trying to tackle some of the barriers they themselves encounter. Finally teachers are encouraged to think about the overall goal, the telos, for both inclusion and for themselves as teachers. In framing inclusive education as an ethical project, special education is identified as 'the main danger' (Foucault, 1984, p343) to be worked upon. The framework of ethics is presented as particularly relevant to young disabled people, providing a basis for challenging some of the exclusionary barriers they encounter and enabling them determine the kind of work on themselves which will enable them 'not to renounce the soul … but to transgress its borders, to reinvent one's relationship to it' (Bernaur, 1999, xiv).Putting the philosophers of difference to work on inclusion has produced a series of tentative propositions about what the key players (teachers, other professionals, teacher educators, researchers, children and their parents) might actually do with these ideas whilst avoiding reducing what is suggested to a set of practical tips or to the kinds of enjoinders which ensure special education remains dominant (Slee, 1993; Brantlinger, 2006). The propositions are concerned with, first of all, significant shifts in the way teachers and children and engage with each other, in the school spaces and in learning processes, and involve addressing the power imbalances in schools in favour of the students to enable them to participate more fully and effectively. This first set of propositions amount to subverting, subtracting and inventing. The second set of propositions are concerned with changes in the processes of learning to teach and in the opportunities available to practising teachers for a more politicised form of engagement. These involve recognition of the double-edged and contradictory nature of inclusive teacher education, rupture of conventional approaches to learning to teach and attempts to repair the profession by encouraging teachers to work on their own selves. The third set of propositions move outside conventional school spaces and makes use of arts practices, particularly the transgressive work by disabled artists, to disrupt, expose and transform exclusionary attitudes and practices. Examples of applications of the ideas of the philosophers of difference, in both research and practice, are offered, but more importantly, the ideas are offered as platforms from which to develop exemplifications within local contexts. The reframing of inclusion, using the philosophers of difference, as a social, ethical, and above all, political activity, offers a reimagining which identifies everyone - including young disabled people themselves - as powerful and capable of acting upon inclusion. It seeks to change the environments, the spaces and the people within them, to incite them to use this power and to direct it in productive directions. A key element of the reimagining is in relation to the role of academics, as curious, rather than as experts, as acting to 'complicate rather than explicate' (Taylor and Saarinen, 1995, p7) and as pursuing, not understanding, but 'interstanding' (ibid, p3). The act of interstanding occurs when depth gives way to surface, in a search for what stands between. It involves risking the personal (Ware, 2002) and threatens a further 'decline of the donnish dominion' (Halsey, 1992, 258) and an undermining of academic culture and autonomy (Paterson, 2003). It is argued, however, that academics need to rediscover the civic duty which was behind the creation of universities in the first place, in what was known as 'democratic intellectualism' (Paterson, ibid, p69). The hostility towards inclusion by teachers appears to be matched by a desire to recover their professionalism and to enable them to 'make significant differences in the lives of their students on a daily basis' (Harvey-Koelpin, 2006, p129). The provocations from the philosophers of difference seeks to advance these aims and to make inclusion a more realistic possibility by 'acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come (Nietzsche, 1983, p60).References Baker, B (2002) The hunt for disability: the new Eugenics and the normalization of school children, Teachers College Record, 104 (4) pp663-703. Bains, P (2002) Subjectless subjectivities in B Massumi (ed) A shock to thought: expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London and New York: Routledge.Bernauer, J (1999) "Cry of spirit": foreward to M Foucault Religion in Culture. Edited by J Carette. 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