What We Talk about When We Talk about Travel: A Contribution to the Critique of Educational Teleology
Edited by Predrag Krstić Author(s) Aleksandar Ostojić Publisher Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade Published 2023 ISBN 978-86-82324-28-7 Pages 223 Edition What We Talk About
This book is a veritable intellectual thicket, in which one could easily get lost. Literary heroes whose characters reflect various kinds of adventures are, to name but a few, Homer’s vagrant, Chauser’s pilgrims, Cervantes’ knight, Swift’s adventurer, Defoe’s builder, Rousseau’s pupil, Joyce’s flaneur, but also Morrell’s insurgent, even Roddenberry’s spaceship, or even ultimately, Flaubert’s bungler. Various too are the philosophical writings on the traveler, from Todorov’s classifications, Derrida’s tension between departure and arrival, Serres’ invocation of Hermes as god of interpretation and understanding, Deleuze’s advocating of nomadic thinking, Lyotard’s warnings against the instrumentalization of the ratio, and finally Rancière’s moral of the ignorant schoolmaster. The difficult endeavor of placing all these tendencies of bygone epochs and pulsating modernity under a single umbrella focuses on the motif of travel, seeking to uncover in it novel interpretations. Despite the kaleidoscopic view, the text forms a single trope.