'A Wider Range than mental lines can keep': Some meditations on Metonymic Philosophies and Education

Abstract

During my time as a teacher, I would regularly teach the differences between similes, metaphors and metonyms. Though this paper will touch on my experience of teaching these things that is not its principal concern. Instead, I want to discuss the more general ways in which two philosophers (Derrida and Deleuze) privilege metonymic ways of viewing language. In a sense, I will be providing a metadiscourse 'of sorts' on metonymy and metonym. Metaphors, as they ordinarily appear, involve both division and suitability of fit. So, for example, if a poet refers to the sun as 'the eye of heaven' then we have a division between the sun (the real 'original' thing) and its metaphorical realisation as 'the eye of heaven'. Moreover, the implication is that we can logically determine what is being described because the sun is eye-shaped and it is up in the sky. Of course, to say the sun is eye-shaped is, in a sense, wrong—the sun is round. The fact that the wrongness here does not immediately strike us reveals a deeper metonymic quality to language. In this paper I look at contrasting philosophical approaches to metonymy as they feature in the work of Derrida and Deleuze. From there, I consider various issues pertaining to education and translation.