Derrida, Democracy and the State of Education: Learning, by Design, Perchance

When Derrida admits the example of the Clipper chip into the book version of Politics of Friendship, he intends only to recall that a reflection on the politics of friendship should be indistinguishable from a meditation on the meaning, history and techniques of the secret. However, in doing so, he also admits a discussion of how ‘tele-technologies’ disturb the conditions of the Kantian 'secret', as that which one thinks must remain secret because an engagement has been entered upon and a promise made in certain non-natural conditions. In this way, Derrida alerts us, first, to the role of designs, as 'technologies', within the public realm in allying the contemporary liberal political subject to the humanist educational subject; and, second, to the potential of design education within the university, in advocating a philoxenia that welcomes the invention of the other, to break with the horizon of cosmopolitics as phratrocentrism.