The neo-conservative subjectification of English teachers (as “language technicists” and “preachers of culture”) is being resisted in Australia (for example, Doecke, Howie and Sawyer, 2006a). In this climate of contestation, the (re) conceptualisation of English as a critical space promoting social justice cannot be ethical or just if it effaces other ideas and ways of being. For “resistance” then ends up being indistinguishable from the totalizing force it opposes. As an experienced teacher and professional representative of others, I explore how I have (re) read and (re) written my teaching self and practice in response to public criticisms of my support for critical literacy by Donnelly (2007), a prominent neo-conservative educational commentator. Drawing on the work of Kostogriz and Doecke (2007; cf. Bakhtin, 1981, Levinas, 1998), I argue that the ethical experience of encountering the Other can generate new understandings of the teacher self. I go on to affirm the importance of an open and unfinalizable understanding of the teacher subject as a generative response to the conservative re-centring of the teaching subject.