Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
JUNHO. 2016
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suposta a existncia de uma assimetria entre o nvel superior de conhecimento do professor e o nvel inferior de conhecimento do aluno. Quando supe
que o professor pode prov-lo de conhecimento, o aluno o elege como autoridade.
Quando ensina, o professor supe concretizar essa autoridade. assim que a
assimetria entre professor e aluno remete polaridade inicial entre o genitor
que sabe e prov e a criana, que quer saber e ser provida.
Em situaes consideradas ideais quando autoridade pedaggica formal
e autoridade pedaggica real coincidem , o campo transferencial pode dificultar ou, mesmo, inviabilizar as finalidades educacionais. O aluno pode incluir o
professor em uma srie psquica hostil, manifestando desinteresse, indiferena ou
agressividade ostensiva prprios de quem no reconhece a autoridade. Essa transferncia negativa pode ativar ncleos inconscientes hostis do professor que reage
promovendo algum tipo de enfrentamento, em vez de priorizar os contedos.
A curiosidade intelectual necessria ao ensino e aprendizagem
importante elemento constitutivo da personalidade psquica. Aproximadamente
entre trs e cinco anos, a criana, que, sobretudo, pergunta, manifesta curiosidade sexual sublimada em curiosidade intelectual. Essa curiosidade deriva da
percepo da diferena anatmica entre os sexos e fonte de todas as perguntas
sobre a relao sexual entre os pais e sobre a prpria origem. As excntricas
teorias sexuais elaboradas pela criana so respostas da fantasia a tais enigmas.
A constituio anatmica infantil ainda no produziu o esperma e nem
finalizou o desenvolvimento do orifcio sexual feminino, essenciais reproduo
da espcie: a criana fica sem o nexo de realidade para desvendar o enigma da
sua origem, subjacente curiosidade sexual. Alm da sublimao, a curiosidade
sexual enfrenta o recalcamento. Devido ao desses dois processos, a criana
curiosa pergunta sobre uma infinidade de eventos que aparentemente nada tm
de sexuais.
Intensos sentimentos erticos e hostis depositados nos genitores so
recalcados no apogeu do conflito edipiano, atendendo a exigncias da realidade
exterior e do superego. Perguntas diretamente referidas sexualidade passam
pelo mesmo processo. Demandas pulsionais do id clamam por satisfao atingindo a representao consciente atravs de disfarces, cujo contedo no revela
o verdadeiro interesse subjacente.
Como no possvel ter os pais para amar ou destruir, a criana obrigada
a trilhar outro caminho: escolhe um papel sexual social, a partir de caractersticas anatmicas observadas nos pais e em modelos emocionais que oferecem.
Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130
125
Resumo
So apresentados os elementos psquicos inconscientes que estruturam a relao
pedaggica para mostrar que tanto podem favorecer como dificultar o exerccio
adequado da autoridade do professor, quando essa substituda pela seduo. O
intercmbio emocional inconsciente da relao professor-aluno acarreta a revivescncia
recproca de afetos do passado infantil sem que os sujeitos envolvidos se deem conta
disso. A revivescncia inconsciente do passado infantil possvel graas identificao,
transferncia e contratransferncia: essas operaes psquicas so apresentadas
Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130
127
Abstract
The unconscious psychic elements that structure the pedagogical relationship are presented to
show that they can either favor or difficult the adequate exercise of the teachers authority, when
this structure is replaced by seduction. The unconscious emotional interchange of the relationship
teacher-student brings a reciprocal reviviscence of affection of the past childhood even though the
subjects involved dont notice it. The unconscious reviviscence of the past childhood is possible due to
the identification, the transference and the counter-transference: these psychic operations are presented
conceptually in psychoanalytical terms, to show how the process in which they articulate may result
in seduction. When the unconscious reviviscence is very intense and exclusive, the seduction overlaps
the authority disfiguring the teaching and the learning.
Keywords: authority; seduction; identification; transference; counter-transference.
Resumen
Son presentados los elementos psquicos inconscientes que estructuran la relacin pedaggica
para mostrar que pueden favorecer como dificultar el ejercicio de autoridad del profesor cuando
esa es reemplazada por la seduccin. El intercambio emocional inconsciente de la relacin profesor
alumno trae consigo la reviviscencia reciproca de afectos del pasado infantil sin que los sujetos
implicados se den cuenta de esto. La reviviscencia inconsciente del pasado infantil es posible gracias
a la identificacin, a la transferencia y a la contratransferencia: esas operaciones psquicas son
presentadas conceptualmente en trminos psicoanalticos, para mostrar como el proceso en que se
articulan puede resultar en la seduccin. Cuando la reviviscencia inconsciente es muy intensa y
exclusiva, la seduccin se sobrepone a la autoridad tergiversando la enseanza y el aprendizaje.
Palabras clave: autoridad; seduccin; identificacin; transferencia; contratransferencia.
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Referncias
Adorno, T. W. y otros. (1965). La personalidad autoritria. Buenos Aires, Editorial
Proyeccin.
. (2000 [1971]). Tabus acerca do magistrio. In: Educao e emancipao.
Trad. de Wolfang Leo Mar. 2. ed. So Paulo, Paz e Terra.
Barbero, G. H. (2010). A identidade do professor. Psicopedagogia Online. vol. 1/10.
Freud, S. (1980 [1892-1899]). Carta n 69 a Fliess. In: Edio Standard Brasileira
das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad. de Jos Octvio de
Aguiar Abreu. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. I, pp. 350-352.
. (1980 [1912]). A dinmica da transferncia. In: Edio Standard Brasileira
das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad. de Jos Octvio de
Aguiar Abreu. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XII, pp. 129-143.
. (1980 [1914]). Observaes sobre o amor transferencial. In: Edio
Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad.
de Jos Octvio de Aguiar Abreu. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XII, pp.
205-223.
. (1980 [1914]). Algumas reflexes sobre a psicologia do escolar. In: Edio
Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad.
de rizon Carneiro Muniz. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XIII, pp. 281-288.
. (1980 [1920]). Alm do princpio de prazer. In: Edio Standard Brasileira
das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad. de rizon Carneiro
Muniz. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XVIII, pp. 11-85.
. (1980 [1921]). Psicologia de Grupo e a anlise do ego. In: Edio
Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad.
de Christiano Monteiro Oiticica. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XVIII, pp.
87-179.
. (1980 [1923)]. O ego e o id. In: Edio Standard Brasileira das Obras
Psicolgicas Completas de Sigmund Freud. Trad. de Jos Octvio de Aguiar
Abreu. Rio de Janeiro, Imago, vol. XIX, pp. 11-83.
Kupfer, M. C. M. (1989). Freud e a educao: o mestre do impossvel. So Paulo,
Scipione.
Laplanche, J. (1988) Teoria da seduo generalizada e outros ensaios. Trad. de Doris
Vasconcellos. Porto Alegre, Artes Mdicas.
Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130
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Springer 2006
JAN JAGODZINSKI
ABSTRACT. This essay attempts to examine the dicult question of sex scandals
both in public school settings and in the academy. It raises issues over the way
authority in the classroom is unequally exercised by both male and female teachers in
terms of power and seduction. However, the Law remains explicit when it comes to
judging who is at fault within a-student relationship that collapses into the bedroom.
The ethics that surround such sexual aairs is raised through the psychoanalytic and
philosophical writings of Jacques Lacan. The essay ends by oering a surprised
perspective over the question whether an ethics of diabolical evil is possible, given
that such aairs are dierentiated as post-Oedipal relationships where age dierentiations have become blurred.
KEY WORDS: sex-scandals, schools, evil, Lacan, psychoanalysis, ethics
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an ethics of the Real will be explained later. This essay explores the
ethical considerations when a studentteacher relationship transforms itself into post-Oedipal forms of love where the usual family
romance that polices the classroom at both the secondary and college
level collapses (jagodzinski, 2004). After a number of detours and side
trips, the struggle to come to terms with such a problematic is
intentionally left dangling until the end.
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time of adolescent Oedipal crisis. When their nurturing role fails, the
head of the school backs up their right to discipline, who is most
often a male. A female principal often becomes yet another dragon
lady who possess the phallus.
The dicult and paradoxical negotiation between the phallic
woman and the nurturing mother as psychically produced subject
positions of normative heterosexuality that must be negotiated in the
classroom directly leads to that dangerous creature whom even
Master William of Baskerville feared the femme fatal, a woman
whose sexuality has become unleashed, like in Duncan Gibbons sci-
lm, Eve of Destruction (1991), where male anxiety when confronting
her chthonic powers can only appeased by way of her death. In an
informative and insightful essay, surely one of the earliest attempts to
address the issue of sex-scandals concerning women teachers who
have been involved with their male students in the Canadian context,
Cavanagh (2004) makes the unprecedented claim that the media
portrays these fallen women as femme fatales who must be punished.
Cavanagh argues that these teachers (Heidi Franziska Coleman, Dale
Gosselin-Taylor, Heather Ingram, Joyce Jaster, Laura Sclater, and
Annie Markson) are portrayed as dangerous subjects because of their
sexual subjectivity and agency in the school. They become the cause
of both male student and media anxiety caught up in and by maternal
transferences and countertransferences. In this way the femme fatale
remains an eective support for patriarchal domination, the fundamental disavowed passionate attachment, as Butler (1997) would
say, that maintains the modern male subjects identity.
Cavanagh focuses on the case of thirty-three-year-old Annie
Markson who had exchanged sexually explicit e-mail correspondences with an admiring grade eight student, a fourteen-year-old
whose name was withheld in the press. She had dated the student
ve times and had only given him a hug and a peck on the check.
While exonerated of sexual misconduct, Markson was dismissed from
her job by the Ontario College of Teachers for professional misconduct. The sensationalist media coverage that followed (the publication of her love letters, constant hounding, and so on), argues
Cavanagh, focused more on the erotic relationship than on the
question of the abuse of pedagogical power. The teachers breast(s)
become the paradoxical object of both maternal and erotic countertransference by the heterosexual male student (Gallop, 1995a). Boys
who attempt to seduce their teachers, as in the Markson case where
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student may have been the cause of her attraction to and latter the
destruction of Gales seemingly brilliant exposes in the classroom.
Yet, all along he was an alcoholic who was unable to sustain a family
bond, displaying a fraudulent phallus. It is often the same attractive
detail lets say Gales brilliant wit and insight which Berlin was
unable to accept once he rejected her demand that also made her want
to destroy his career through the rape charge. He had become a piece
of shit to her rather than the adored professor he once was. Her
object-cause of desire had vacated his body so that she might reap
revenge and disavow her own scholarly failure. Gale, on the other
hand, allows himself to be seduced knowing that this act was his own
death drive, a ruining of his life which he will redeem paradoxically
(for those who have seen the lm) through his own death at the end of
the narrative. Because of the ambivalence of this object-cause of
desire, Lacan used the special word jouissance (enjoyment) to invoke
both the pleasure and pain that comes with the act of desiring.
Without this ethical question surrounding jouissance, what Lacan
would call the Real of desire, it becomes dicult to sort out the place
of erotics in education. Pleasure is reduced to a psychological state.
This leaves McWilliam (2000, pp. 3536) giving a nod tongue and
cheek mind you to Gallops (1982b, 1995b) perverse pleasure in
disciplining students, claiming that this Sadean erotic characterizes
the calculations and disciplining that teaching oers.
The transference of love between student/teacher is not the issue
when it comes to such moments; the transference of love has to
happen if knowledge is to be transferred. A number of educators have
already recognized the importance of transference in the pedagogical
relationship (Higgins, 1998; Robertson, 1999; Baumlin and Weaver,
2000). Hate is its opposite coin must also be recognized if resistance in
schools is to emerge. Love/hate are fundamentally intertwined and
almost every psychoanalytic position has to acknowledge them to
theorize subjective identity. (Lacan added ignorance to these two). A
student or teacher, regardless of their sex-orientation can have a
crush, but keep it to themselves. Such a relationship can also be
disavowed. These are all Imaginary formations. There is no encounter
with the Real of unconscious desire here. The Real only emerges when
there is no missed encounter with ones jouissance, where the pain
and pleasure of the encounter raise ethical consequences.
Lacans ethics of the Real is developed primarily in Seminar VII
(195960), The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Rather than situating ethics
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McWilliam (1996b, pp. 134135) has it right when she refers to the pupils
seduction to the teachers love-of-teaching-self, or the pupils love of the subject
that the teacher embodies. She has it wrong when she refers to the eroticism of
counting (numbers) which is a restatement of Western pederastic teaching. On the
critique of digital numbers in pedagogy see MacCannell (1991, p. 76).
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one strictly dichotomizes the studentteacher relationship that governs each respective institution: schooling is based on mutual relations between teacher and student in pursuit of established knowledge
while in the Academy and in the psychoanalytic clinic emphasis is
placed on self-reexivity that is purely dyadic. But the question of
countertransference turns any dialogical exchange into a relational
one where the aim is to engender transformation and development
(see Alston 1998 for an opposing view). Both the Academy, what
Lacan in S XVII, Lenvers de la psychanalyse (19691970) referred to
as the discourse of the university, and psychoanalysis in general
have acknowledged this aspect of the exchange. In a letter to Jung,
Freud most certainly said that psychoanalysis was a cure through
love, and in his writings on transference (1912), he advocated that the
bond between analyst and analysand was to be empathetic, nonjudgmental and loving. Nor was he silent concerning the analytic
hindrances when patients fell in love with their analysts (1915).
Socrates loves Alcibiades but refuses to give up on his desire for the
greater pursuit of wisdom. This raises an ethics of the Real (see jagodzinski, 2004b). Lacans response would be that the teacher must
refuse love since the object-cause that is perceived in him/herself is
pure nothing, an emptiness. It is to be found elsewhere.
Such a Lacanian reading departs from pervious educators who
have examined Eros and knowledge together through their reading of
Platos (1961b) Symposium (see in particular Alston,1991, 1999 and
Burch, 1999, 2000). An exception is Higgins (1998) who addresses the
same issue by examining Freuds comments on love and transference.
It is also dierentiated from Muirs reading of Platos (1961c) Phaedrus (2000) where the teachers desire is to aid in the transformation
of the students soul through increased knowledge of the good (p.
246, emphasis added) what Muir identies as psychagogia or soulleading. I am in partial agreement here, but the morality that surrounds the good is misleadingly and dichotomously raises the
question of the bad when it comes to the transference and countertransferences of desire. Lacan (Seminar VII, Ethics, 19591960) and
Freud are concerned with the ethics of transference and not the
question of the involved morality of the patient. The Good is too
value laden even when it refers to the practice of teaching (more
below). The student misperceives where his/her desire lies. To place it
in Muirs context: where his or her soul lies. Hence the teacher must
try to retain this emptiness since the students transference usually
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emerges when s/he does not want to encounter his/her own desire.
Berlin wants to score Gale rather than face her own inadequacies, as
does Alcibiades. Instead s/he oers him/herself as the object of love
to the teacher as in teach me. Fill me up with knowledge. By
refusing this demand for physical love to be possessed or swallowed
by the student, the teacher has to maintain the presentment of
emptiness so that rather than returning physical love, the teacher
might be able to return the students desire in the form of the enigmatic objet a s/he seeks in the subject matter, in the question, or in
the search, but not in the teachers physical body. The come on can
be used advantageously to uncover whats eating the student. Pedagogically this means knowing not how not to transmit but how to
suspend knowledge (Johnson, 1987, p. 85, added emphasis) and
displace the Eros.
The ethics of Eros does not mean eliminating it, for that is
impossible anyway because of the transference and countertransference that take place, but to work with the dangers which Eros brings
and must bring. A teachers love should be directed toward the
mystery that is more in the student than him or herself at his or
her objet a, or soul in terms of dated terminology. Such a suspension
and displacement allows for the analytic exploration of the objet a of
fantasy, the cause of the passion: the question, the inquisition, the
search, and the fascination with the teacher in the rst place. It
enables the student to continue to deal further with his/her own
desires. Such a not knowing on the students part (misperception of
his/her love object) can be understood in the negative sense of
ignorance; that is to say, as result of unconscious repression. But
ignorance can also be understood positively as well, as the pursuit of
what is forever in the act of escaping, the inhabiting of that space
where knowledge becomes the obstacle to knowing (Johnson, 1987,
p. 85), a coming to terms with ones own drives and the fantasy
objects of desire. So, how is this understanding of pedagogical
transference dierent from Gallops perverted one? After all, doesnt
she play the most dangerous game of Eros of all?
THE PERVERTED MISDIRECTION
With the above discussion in mind, we can return to Jane Gallop. The
social link of perversion diers from the analytic position of a good
teacher in one crucial way. While the teacher should reduce him/
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herself to the void that confronts the student into confronting the
truth of his/her desire, the pervert knows exactly what s/he is for the
Other. In this sense it is an inverted fantasy since the pervert sets him
or herself up as the object of the Others jouissance. Perversion (or
pe`re-version as Lacan puns) deals with disavowal (Verleugnung) of the
fathers desire rather than with repression (Verdrangung) that occur in
the other pedagogical discourses, which result in neurotic psychic
structures such as hysteria and obsession. For desire to emerge in
relation to the Law there has to be a denite sacrice of jouissance
through castration imposed by both parents. Perversion, on the other
hand, has to do with the disavowal of such castration. Rather than
handing over some pleasure to the Other (the pound of esh), the
pervert refuses to surrender pleasure to the Other. Instead, there is a
will to jouissance. An attempt is made to substitute (or mime, parody) the paternal phallus through a fetishistic fantasmatic object (the
lesbian or fantasy phallus, for instance, where in lesbian perverse
desire this becomes the female body itself; while the loss of the
mothers voice as the narcissistic wound of alienation (but not separation) represents the fantasy phallus for the gay subject), or an
attempt to prop up the paternal function so that the law pronounces
itself to locate for oneself the place of the Law. The disavowal of the
paternal function implies a certain staging (performance) or makebelieve regarding its presence. The pervert needs the Other for his/her
own ends, which appears, at rst glance, as if the pervert desires only
to please the Other.
From this cursory understanding of the perverted structure it can
be seen why Gallop is performing a transgression of the paternal no
the daughters seduction, which was the title of her book (1982a)
upon which she made her academic reputation. Gallop refuses to give
up her jouissance in the name of the paternal injunction; that is to say,
to be castrated by the father. Gallop refuses to be had by her male
professors, rather she has them sexually.2 The professorial body is
the penis cum phallus that Gallop wanted as a graduate student. This
is explicitly formulated when she says, Seducing them made me feel
kind of cocky and that allowed me to presume I had something to say
worth saying (Gallop 1997, p. 42, emphasis added). When she
2
Some of this is explicated when she talks about her relationship to Jerey Mehlman as her father-professor gure and dissertation director (Gallop, 1988, p. 32).
There is a hint here as to why she rages so strongly against the father. The reader is
informed that her own father never paid enough attention to her, spending more time
with his son.
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Her rhetorical skills are brilliantly in full display in The lecherous professor: A
reading (1995b). Ebert (1996, 801) attempts to deconstruct Gallops rhetorical parlance.
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choose to work with me, and the satisfaction I get from seeing the
imprint of my teaching in their work all singly suggest a sexual
analogy (Gallop, 1997, p. 53 and p. 87 respectively, added emphasis.).
The following quotes illustrate the aim of her drive: I remember
the feminist student I was, what I wanted and what I didnt want, and
I remember that it was precisely my sense of knowing what I did and
didnt want that made me feel so strong (p. 39). On the relationship
with a student she writes: [B]oth found our secret titillating: it was a
perverse thrill to treat him in class just like the other students though
all the while we also had this sexual relation outside the class (p. 44).
Finally, she says as if to exonerate herself, It was always the student
who initiated sexual activity (1997, p. 49). But as Socrates says,
[vulgar lovers] take their pleasures where they nd them, good and
bad alike (Symposium, 181b).
One of the paradoxical claims Lacan makes about perversion is
that while it presents itself as a will to jouissance (the pursuit of
pleasure seeking activity), its less apparent aim is to bring the Law into
being, or to make the Other lay down, stipulate and demand the law.
Paradoxically, the pervert gets o on staging the very operation that is
supposed to require a loss of jouissance. S/he derives satisfaction from
the enactment of the very operation that demands s/he separate from
the source of its satisfaction. There are two ways such a game is played
out that calls upon the limits of the Law: one is masochistic, the other
sadistic. They are not opposites. As far as I am able to read, only the
masochistic strategy is evident in Gallops pedagogy. The masochistic
strategy is to have the Other lay down the Law so that the Law curbs a
certain jouissance, sets a limit. Such a demand presents a fantasy of an
apparent altruism: Nothing for me, but everything for my students
(as Other). The perverted teacher is always in service of his/her students. But this veils another aim, that there is something in it for the
pervert: namely to cast him/herself in the role of the objet a for the
Other, often in a narcissistic role of desire that s/he controls. Such a
desire comes out most clearly in the failed joke (SBJF) which eventually set the stage for Gallops harassment charge: graduate students
are my sexual preference (1997, p. 86). The pervert makes the partner
(student) anxious so s/he is pushed to lay the Law down. The student
must be pushed to a certain extent, bullied into declaring limits, into
expressing his/her will that things go one way and not another; that
things go no further; that things have been pushed to the breaking
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her raw and bald expositions. My reading of Gallop judged her acts
on the side of the later rather than the former proposition, arguing
that she was blind to her own unconscious desire not a beautiful
gure in Lacans terms, but one who did shake up the symbolic order,
but she was never in the throws of a death drive. Her narcissism was
all but too clear. But, can this be said of the well-publicized case of
Mary Kay Letourneau?
In a remarkably bold analysis of Mary Kay Letourneau, a thirtysix-year-old school teacher who was imprisoned for her passionate
love aair with her thirteen-year-old grade six pupil, Vili Fualaau,
Zizek (1999, p. 381, pp. 385391) questions the evilness of such a
perverse act that was condemned by the Moral Majority as well as
politically correct liberals as child molestation. He argues that an
ethical act has to be separated out from the question of the mutual
interweaving of Good and Evil, which present a false dichotomy to
the question at hand. Zizek argues that Mary Kay Letourneau
committed an ethical act, an act which is singular in its consequences,
and to be judged on ethical and not moral grounds. How? Following
Lacan, Zizek claims that Mary Kay Letourneau did not compromise
her desire. In contrast to Lolita, he argues, where Humbert treats the
underage girl as a masturbatory fantasy, as a nymphet of his own
solipsistic imagination, it ends in a teasing and exploitive relationship
on both sides. In contrast Mary Kay was sincerely passionate
towards her young lover, treating him as an adult. It may have been
morally wrong, but not ethically so. Released early from a six months
jail sentence on the grounds she was not to have any contact with the
boy, she was arrested weeks later when a police ocer came upon the
pair in a parked car. She was then sentenced for seven years. The
mother of his two children they are now married.
Mary Kay Letourneau, Annie Markson, Sydney Orr, David Gale,
and Jane Gallop were all caught by their fundamental fantasy, the
kernel of their being that the machinery of jouissance governs, by the
stupid superegos injunction to enjoy! as Zizek would say, which
increasingly dominates and regulates the perverse universe of our late
capitalist experience (p. 390). But, it is their death drive, that
dimension of existence which escapes the clutches of temporal contingency, and searches for immortality that enables them to escape
the stupid superegos death drive of enjoyment and traverse their
fantasy through an ethical act. As Diotima says in the Symposium,
Love is (at its heart) a longing for immortality (207a). For those
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who have seen the lm, David Gale also sacrices his life, knowingly,
for a greater cause not unlike a Palestinian suicide bomber. The
choice, as Zizek says, is not between good or bad, but bad and
worse. So one must ask: Did Orr transverse his fundamental fantasy
through an ethical act as Letourneau and Gale may have? Did Annie
Markson commit an ethical act? Was she an example of that frightening creature that Zizek (2000) calls the new femme fatale, a
woman who is willing to pay the price of her punishment by fully
accepting the male game of manipulation and her threat to the
paternal Law, and then tries to beat it at its own game as played
out ironically in Rob Marsalls lm Chicago (2002)? And what about
Gallop? Does she not also demonstrate the oxymoron of a neo-femme
fatale both sexy and authoritatively powerful who spits at the
patriarchal Law and wins! Or, were these teachers and professors all
caught by the stupidity of their own jouissance+? Diabolical evil will
always be with us. To avoid the Sadean trap of unbridled jouissance,
perhaps the only way to combat it is to struggle with our unconscious
desire. Psychoanalysis, in this sense, is ethics. Yet, ultimately, each of
us has to judge each case uniquely to see where the beauty lies.
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Alston, K. (1998). So give me love, love, love, love, crazy love: Teachers, sex and
transference. In S. Tozer (Ed), Philosophy of education (pp. 366369). Urbana,
Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society.
Baumin, J.S. & Weaver, M.E. (2000). Teaching, classroom authority, and the
psychology of transference. The Journal of General Education, 49(2), 7587.
Bredbeck, G.W. (1995). Analyzing the classroom: On the impossibility of a queer
pedagogy. In G.E. Haggerty and B. Zimmerman (Eds), Professions of desire:
Lesbian and gay studies in literature (pp. 89109). New York: Modern Language
Association of America.
Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight.
Educational Theory, 45(2), 151165.
Burch, K.Th. (1999). Eros as the educational principle of democracy. Studies in
Philosophy and Education, 18(3), 123142.
Burch, K.Th. (2000). Eros as the educational principle of democracy. New York: Peter
Lang.
Butler, J. (1997). Psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press.
Cavanagh, S.L. (2004). Upsetting desires in the classroom: School sex scandals and
the pedagogy of the femme fatale. Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture &
Society, (forthcoming).
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JAN JAGODZINSKI
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362
JAN JAGODZINSKI
Id like to develop a Greek model of education that sees a role for eros
in cultivating students intellectual growth. Contemporary concerns about
sexual harassment and exploitation in the student-teacher relationship
have often resulted in policies and attitudes that reject a role for desire in
the classroom. At the same time, a rare number of educators have advocated sexualizing the professional relations between teacher and student,
as a way of using the power of desire to energize education. I suggest a
Kathleen Hull, winner of the NEA 2002 Excellence in the Academy New Scholar award,
is an adjunct associate professor of the humanities in the General Studies Program at
New York University (NYU). She completed her Ph.D. in religious studies in 1996 at
Drew University; and holds an M.A. in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University.
third way: We need to examine the place of love, desire, and aspiration for
ends other than sexual satisfaction in the classroom. Why? Because passions are real and they can be important to a persons learning experience.
Yet, if mishandled by teachers, they can be harmful.
s teachers, we cant help but notice the easy charm and grace of our
students. Its one of the pleasures of working with young people.
Twenty minutes into the first day of the first class I taught at New York
University (NYU), in strolled a
beautiful female student with long,
wavy dark hair, wearing a tight limegreen top, black, stretchy jeans, and
boots with heels. She successfully
garnered the attention of everyone
in the room for about two minutes
as she breathlessly asked about the
course. Since I was in the middle of
my big, first-day pitch about the
(more abstract) beauty of the ideas
and ideals of ancient Greece, inside
my head, I was ready to kill her. Her
name was Racquel. Her mother was
a nightclub singer in New York. She turned out to be one of the best students in the class.
When I look back on it now, she was the Alcibiades bursting in on my
calm, controlled, Platonic tableaux. Racquel came to my office just once
to discuss her work in the course. She wrote a wonderful paper on
medieval mysticismthe only student of mine ever to do so. After the
final examthe last time I saw hershe brought me a purple pot filled
with primroses. She was a beautiful girl.
Was I in love with her? No. But I was aware of her sensuality in addition to her fine intelligence and warm personality. Looking back on it, I
think she probably admired me, too. It was classic: a student enamored
of her teacher, and that teacher responding genuinely to the students
desire to please the teacher. The result was some fine academic work and
good learning. She worked hard to impress me with her intelligence, the
best gift she could offer and I could accept in a learning setting. The flowers were, perhaps, a sign of the richness of the non-intellectual dimensions of a human relationship.
A lot of anecdotal evidence is circulating in the halls of academia indicating that sometimes students come to love and desire their teachers and
sometimes teachers love and desire their students. Such stories circulated
in Platos academy, as well. I recently had a rare conversation with two
male colleagues about women students who had fallen in love with them
We need to recognize
that classroom education
is a physical activity: All
of the learning and
discussion and exchange
of ideas is carried out by
embodied beings.
ital eye, Hillman means the eye that sees the erotic only as sexual. In
contrast, Hillman recognizes the greater depths of eros. Exploring the
importance of mentors in peoples lives, he tells several stories about the
special perception of the schoolmasters eyeby the teacher who sees
a pupils gifts.
A particularly memorable tale concerns Elia Kazans relationship with
his eighth-grade teacher, Miss Shank, who influenced the direction of
Kazans life. As Kazan reports:
A deep-dyed romantic, she
was the one who told me that I
had beautiful brown eyes.
Twenty-five years later, she wrote
me a letter. When you were only
twelve, she wrote, you stood
near my desk one morning and
the light from the window fell
across your head and features and
illuminated the expression on
your face. The thought came to
me of the great possibilities there
were in your development2
The teacher, in that moment, fell in love with the boywith, as she
writes, the great possibilities within him. But what she saw was his
external beauty. This I suggest, is an example of eros at work. Yet many
assume that the presence of the erotic in the classroom is essentially
acquisitive, selfish, self-centered, and directed toward self-satisfaction.
No matter where or how it erupts, the erotic is seen as a threat to the
morality of the student/teacher relationship. But this does not have to be.
Id like us to slow down and consider this most humanand perhaps
divineenergy that infuses our experience of one another and of the
world. I raise the question of the erotic as a way of asking what teaching
is, what the goals of teaching should be, what the ends of education are,
and ultimately, how we characterize the relation between knowledge and
teaching.
e could do worse than draw upon an idea of John Deweys here,
namely, that the education process is identified with the growth of
experience, with growing as developing. For Dewey, experience is understood in active termsdoing things that change ones objective environment and/or ones internal conditions. Dewey would say that any inquiry
worth its salt begins with a clearly identified problematic situation.
lar ends, to be agents in their own lives rather than passive persons, notetakers, memorizers, or even A students who know all the answers.
Perhaps the possibility for responsible construction of the self begins
with the experience of ones impossible passions.
Platos portrayal of Socrates offers the foundations for such a teaching
and learning model. As Socrates remarks in Phaedrus:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; for to be
curious about that which is not my
concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be
ridiculous. . . . For, as I was saying,
I want to know not about [these
theories], but about myself: Am I a
monster more complicated and
swollen with passion than the serpent Thyph, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom
Nature has given a diviner and
lowlier destiny?6
Postmodern thinkers
suggest that justice,
beauty, truth, and the
good dont exist; but
few would deny the
human drive toward
such conceptual objects.
Teachers make ideas known in and through the sensible; Socrates, the
unattractive, potbellied teacher who claims to know nothing, brings
about in his students a desire for what they do not have: knowledge, or
better, self-knowledge. Plato finds the source of desire for knowledge in
the dialogical process of the eros itself, that is, in the coming to be of the
student toward her own full realization.
But how does Socrates engender a consuming desire to know in his
students? This is our key question. The average student appears to desire
nothing; indeed, he or she seems
coolly indifferent, complacent, even
cynical toward the idea of learning.
How is this complacency turned
around, such that an absence is felt
and a desire created?
As you will recall, although
Socrates always begged off from
claiming that he had knowledge
the famous Socratic ignorancehe
is reported to have said in the dialogue Lysis that he knew nothing
except about eros. Certainly there may have been physically erotic dimensions to Socratess relationships with some young men of Athens. But his
eros had another side to it. This other side of eros he claimed to have
learned from the priestess Diotima. As he says in Symposium, She is the
one who taught me the art of love (201D).
The teachers challenge, as I have diagnosed it, is that students suffer
from the sleep of desire. What Diotima, the teacher of one of historys
most famous teachers, teaches is the remedy for this sleeping sickness.
Socrates says:
All this she taught me, on those occasions when she spoke on the art of
love. And once she asked me, What do you think causes love and desire,
Socrates?. . . I said . . . that I didnt know. . . . But thats why I came to you,
Diotima, just as I said. I knew I needed a teacher. So tell me what causes this,
and everything else that belongs to the art of love (207A-207C).10
What needs to be
cultivated in students
is a healthy recognition
of their deficiency.
ENDNOTES
1 James
2 Hillman,
1997, 117.
3 El
10
11
WORKS CITED
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology. Edited
by Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957.
Hillman, James. The Souls Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random
House, 1997.
Jaspers, Karl. Plato and Augustine, The Great Philosophers. Vol. 1. Edited by Hannah Arendt.
Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957.
Lorde, Audre. The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches. Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, 1984.
Plato. Phaedrus. In The Works of Plato, ed. Irwin Edman. New York: Modern Library,
1928.
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis,
Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989.
in the classroom setting and deal with them. Writing about Adrienne Richs work,
connecting it to the work of men who thought critically about the body, in her introduction to Thinking Through the Body, Jane Gallop comments:
Men who do find themselves in some way thinking through the body are more
likely to be recognized as serious thinkers and heard. Women have first to prove
that we are thinkers, which is easier when we conform to the protocol that deems
serious thought separate from an embodied subject in history. Rich is asking women to enter the realms of critical thought and knowledge without becoming disembodied spirit, universal man. Beyond the realm of critical thought, it is equally
crucial that we learn to enter as disembodied spirit. In the heady early days of
Womens Studies classes at Stanford University, I learned by the example of daring, courageous woman professors (particularly Diane Middlebrook) that there
was a place for passion in the classroom, that eros and the erotic did not need to
be denied for learning to take place. One of the central tenets of feminist critical
pedagogy has been the insistence on not engaging the mind/body split. This is one
of the underlying beliefs that has made Womens Studies a subversive location in
the academy.
While womens studies over the years has had to fight to be taken seriously
by academics in traditional disciplines, those of us who have been intimately engaged as students or a Womens Studies class when she was an undergraduate, stated in conversation that she felt she was having so much trouble with her graduate
courses because she has to come to expect a quality of passionate teaching that is
not present where she is studying. Her comments made me think anew about the
place of passion, of erotic recognition in the classroom setting because I believe
that the energy she felt in our Womens Studies classes was there because of the
extent to which women professors teaching those courses dared to give fully of ourselves, going beyond the mere transmission of information in lectures . Feminist
education for critical consciousness is rooted in the assumption that knowledge
and critical thought done in the classroom should inform our habits of being and
ways of living outside the classroom. Since so many of our early classes were taken
almost exclusively by female students, it was easier for us to not be disembodied
spirits in the classroom. Concurrently , it was expected that we would bring a quality of care and even love to our students.
Eros was present in our classrooms , as a motivating force. As critical pedagogues we were teaching students ways to think differently about gender, understanding fully that this knowledge would also lead them to live differently.
To understand the place of eros and eroticism in the classroom , we must move
beyond thinking of those forces solely in terms of the sexual, though that dimension need not be denied. Sam Keen, in his book The Passionate Life, urges readers
to remember that in its earliest conception erotic potency was not confined to
sexual power but included the moving force that propelled every life-form from a
state of mere potentiality to actuality. Given that critical pedagogy seeks to transform consciousness , to provide students with ways of knowing that enable them
to know themselves better and live in the world more fully, to some extent it must
rely on the presence of the erotic in the classroom to aid the learning process.
Keen continues:
When we limit erotic to its sexual meaning, we betray our alienation from
the rest of nature. We confess that we are not motivated by anything like the mysterious force that moves birds to migrate or dandelions to spring. Furthermore, we
imply that the fulfillment or potential toward which we strive is sexual-the romantic -genital connection between two persons.
Understanding that eros is a force that enhances our overall effort to be
self-actualizing, that it can provide an epistemological grounding informing how
we know what we know, enables both professors and students to use such energy in a classroom setting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite the critical
imagination. Suggesting that this culture lacks a vision or science of hygeology
(health and well-being) Keen asks: What forms of passion might make us whole?
To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather
than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest for knowledge that enables
us to unite theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors
bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are
able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations
in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the
world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears. In many ways this
is frightening. Nothing about the way I was trained as a teacher really prepared
me to witness my students transforming themselves. It was during the years that
I taught in the African American Studies department at Yale (a course on black
women writers) that I witnessed the way education for critical consciousness can
fundamentally alter our perceptions of reality and our actions. During one course
we collectively explored in fiction the power of internalized racism, seeing how it
was described in the literature as well as critically interrogating our experiences.
However, one of the black female students who had always straightened her hair
because she felt deep down that she would not look good if it were not processed-were worn natural-changed. She came to class after a break and told everyone
that this class had deeply affected her, so much so that when she went to get her
usual perm some force within said no. I still remember the fear I felt when she
testified that the class had changed her.
Though I believed deeply in the philosophy of education for critical consciousness that empowers, I had not yet comfortably united theory with practice.
Some small part of me still wanted us to remain disembodied spirits. And her
body, her presence, her changed look was a direct challenge that I had to face and
affirm. She was teaching me.
Now, years later, I read again her final words to the class and recognize the
passion and beauty of her will to know and to act: I am a black woman. I grew up
in Shaker Heights, Ohio. I cannot go back and change years of believing that the
most wonderful thing in the world would be to be Martin Luther King, Jr.s wifebut I can go on and find the strength I need to be the revolutionary for myself
rather than the companion and help for someone else. So no, I dont believe that
we change what has already been done but we can change the future and so I am
reclaiming and learning more of who I am so that I can be whole.
Attempting to gather my thoughts on eroticism and pedagogy, I have reread
student journals covering a span of ten years. Again and again, I read notes that
could easily be considered romantic as students express their love for me, our
class. Here an Asian student offers her thoughts about a class:
You too teach us to talk, where all life speaks in the forest, not just the white mans. Isnt that part of feeling whole- the ability to be able to talk, to not have
to be silent or performing all the time, to be able to be critical and honest-openly? This is the truth you have taught us: all people deserve to speak. Or a black
male student writing that he will love me now and always because our class has
been a dance, and he loves to dance: I love to dance. When I was a child, I danced
everywhere . Why walk there when you ,can shuffle-ball- change all the way. When
I danced my soul ran free. I was poetry. On my Saturday grocery excursions with
my mother, I would flap, flap, flap, ball change the shopping cart through the aisles. Mama would turn to me and say, Boy, stop that dancing. White people think
thats all we can do anyway. I would stop but when she wasnt looking I would do
a quick high bell kick or tow. I didnt care what white people thought, I just loved
to dance-dance-dance. I still dance and I still dont care what people think white
or black. When I dance my soul is free. It is sad to read about men who stop dancing, who stop being foolish, who stop letting their souls fly free.... I guess for me,
surviving whole means never to stop dancing. These words were written by ONeal
LaRon Clark in 1987. We had a passionate teacher/student relationship. He was
taller than six feet; I remember the day he came to class late and came right up to
the front, picked me up and whirled me around.
The class laughed. I called him fool and laughed. It was by way of apologizing for being late, for missing any moment of classroom passion. And so he
brought his own moment. I, too, love to dance. And so we danced our way into
the future as comrades and friends bound by all we had learned in class together.
Those who knew him remember the times he came to class early to do funny imitations of the teacher. He died unexpectedly last year-still dancing, still loving me
now and always. When eros is present in the classroom setting, then love is bound
to flourish. Well-learned distinctions between public and private make us believe
that love has no place in the classroom . Even though many viewers could applaud
a movie like The Dead Poets Society, possibly identifying with the passion of the
professor and his students, rarely is such passion institutionally affirmed. Professors are expected to publish, but no one really expects or demands of us that we
really care about teaching in uniquely passionate and different ways.
Teachers who love students and are loved by them are still suspect in the
academy. Some of the suspicion is that the presence of feelings , of passions, may
not allow for objective consideration of each students merit. But this very notion is based on the false assumption that education is neutral, that there is some
even emotional ground we stand on that enables us to treat everyone equally,
dispassionately. In reality, special bonds between professors and students have
always existed, but traditionally they have been exclusive rather than inclusive. To
allow ones feeling of care and will to nurture particular individuals in the classroom-to expand and embrace everyone-goes against the notion of privatized passion. In student journals from various classes I have taught there have always been
complaints about the perceived special bonding between myself and particular
students.
Realizing that my students were uncertain about expresssions of care and
love in the classroom, I found it necessary to teach on the subject. I asked students
once: Why do you feel that the regard I extend to a particular student cannot also
be extended to each of you? Why do you think there is not enough love or care to
go around? To answer these questions they had to think deeply about the society we live in, how we are taught to compete with one another. They had to think
about capitalism and how it informs the way we think about love and care, the
way we live in our bodies, the way we try to separate mind from body. There is not
much passionate teaching or learning taking place in higher education today. Even
when students are desperately yearning to be touched by knowledge, professors
still fear the challenge, allow their worries about losing control to override their
desires to teach. Concurrently, those of us who teach the same old stubjects in the
same old ways are often inwardly bored-unable to rekindle passions we may have
once felt. If, as Thomas Merton suggests in his essay on was in the activation of
that utmost center. To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within
ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.