The role of authority within education has always been a challenge for educational thought. On the one hand, authority has been regarded as a necessity for educational relationships: Children need someone who stands up for their future and their reasonable interests because they cannot (yet) do so for themselves. On the other hand, authority has always been suspected to imply domination and repression. The critical theoretical studies on “The Authoritarian Personality” form a pre-eminent example in this context because they link authority to a grovelling and destructive obedience.
The movement between the two poles, however, limits the reflection of authority to the general reference of reasonability without considering how authority concretely shapes educational relationships as well as how these relationships continuously reshape (and also question) social orders and hierarchies. In this view “authority” is important for analyzing educational relationships because it provides insights into their dynamics and performative quality. How is authority practically/ rhetorically established, sustained or lost in educational situations? Can educational authority help us to clarify the logic of educational language games?
This paper explores these questions by drawing on Derrida’s philosophical reflections on law/ authority. In his works Derrida presents authority as a quite enigmatic social phenomenon. According to Derrida, authority has a “mystical ground.” It is in some sense “inexplicable” because of an interruption and gap of reasoning. The law/ authority does not have a ground from which to derive its legitimacy. If this were the case it would constitute a relation of necessity. At the same time, however, authority is, according to Derrida, inevitable; for we cannot speak without a reference that grants us the power to speak.
Following Derrida, the precarious quality of authority is realized in – language. This gives rise to the hope that Derrida’s thoughts could be mobilized for a critical inspection of the “language of education.” Could they firstly form the point of departure for a rhetorical analysis of authority within educational relationships? And could they shed light on the project of education itself by visualizing the “vocabulary” that first of all “constitutes” the meaning of education?
In the first part of the paper, I will give an outline of Derrida’s view on law/ authority as briefly envisioned above. For clarifying Derrida’s stance it is also necessary to shortly develop the differential nature of meaning constitution and language. In the two following parts I will bring Derrida’s view to bear on “the language of education.” I will turn to concrete dialogues generated in an educational context and analyze the precarious constitution of educational authority. The focus here lies on the educational situation and its potential development. In the third part of the paper I will – in turn – focus on the rhetorical figures and discursive constellations that constitute the language of education. In my final remarks I seek to generalize my approach to establish an empirical perspective on educational practices/ language games on the grounds of philosophical argumentation.

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