(Non)Relational care ethics: cripped aporetics of compulsory-relationality

This article intervenes in philosophy of education’s care ethics tradition through crip theory and Derridean deconstruction. I argue that when care ethics grounds ethical obligation in relationality – mutual recognition, shared worlds, coherent self-expression – it installs a normative technology that renders aberrant bodyminds either outside educational ethical obligation or as justification for curative and disciplinary violence in schooling. Reading care theorists (Noddings, Tronto, Held, Kittay, Todd) alongside cripped scenes of echolalia, ‘out-of-joint’ worlds, and non-linear knowing, I draw on Derrida’s aporia, spectrality, and différance to argue that ethical responsibility begins precisely where meaning, reality, and sense cannot be secured – where relation falters. I then sketch a (non)relational mutation of care ethics in which obligation follows whatever practices sustain livability rather than the successful performance of relational legibility. The conclusion gestures toward practical consequences: refusing legibility-as-access, protecting opacity and refusal, and reconfiguring responsiveness beyond the normative grammars of relational productivity.