Ethico-Political Judgments in Professional Education and Work

In this chapter we invite a reconsideration of professional judgment in light of difficulties posed by the complex function of language. Welfare professionals – such as educators, pedagogues, nurses, and social workers work on behalf of the state; so too those who mediate laws related to welfare work (e.g., family court judges or barristers) – are inevitably caught up in specific forms of language with various consequences. The opportunity to learn to distance oneself from the socio-symbolic – and often violent – order of language and to speak in new ways about self, others, and experience is crucial for ethico-political judgment. Drawing conceptual inspiration from Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of language, we examine “the sacramental bond that links the human being to language” and the conditions – an experience of infancy – required for a human speaker to emerge “outside” of the normative order of language. Agamben’s theory of infancy underscores the distinction between (“animal”/childish) voice and (“human”/adult) Voice and infancy as liminal space – a zone of indistinction – where signification is suspended and language is rendered inoperative.