ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a concise overview of the life and career of Jacques Derrida, exploring how his substantive philosophical writing could be relevant to a critical social work pedagogy and practice. Derrida was a leading philosopher of what is commonly known as deconstruction, and while never explicitly writing to social work, his later work became more overtly political, and hence of relevance. Following a biographical sketch, the ‘traces’ of some key elements of his work (the ‘trace’ used in a specific Derridean way) are outlined, foregrounding three key threads, all equally important, all interlinked:
Deconstruction as ‘opening up’ texts, programmes and institutions;
The ‘passion of not knowing’ – on alterity, the ‘other’ and hospitality;
The hauntology of justice, the imperative to activism.
Overall, these three threads summons an ethics of learning. From this ethics of learning several signposts are offered for a critical and deconstructive social work pedagogy and practice, with a particular focus on what it could mean for students to respond to the summons of the learning moment, and the obligation to listen (and read) critically in a particular way recognising that a deconstructive hermeneutic always is an intervention, an interruption, a disruption – an ‘encounter’ summonsing action.