Textual Turns and Teaching as Terminable

stasis: psychoanalysis's critique of pedagogy comes from "the desire to escape the pedagogical imperative: a desire - whether possible or impossible - to do away with pedagogy altogether" (23)"every true pedagogue is in effect an anti-pedagogue, not just because every pedagogy has historically emerged as a critique of pedagogy" (24)"The trouble, both with the positivistic and with the negativistic misinterpretations of the psychoanalytical critique of pedagogy, is that they refer exclusively to Lacan's or Freud's explicit statements about pedagogy, and thus fail to see the illocutionary force, the didactic function of the utterance as opposed to the mere content of the statement" (24)"Freud conceives of the process of a psychoanalytic therapy as a learning process - an apprenticeship whose epistemological validity far exceeds the contingent singularity of the therapeutic situation" (27)"Psychoanalysis is thus a pedagogical experience: as a process which gives access to new knowledge hitherto denied to consciousness, it affords what might be called a lesson in cognition [and in miscognition], an epistemological instruction" (27)"In Lacan's own terms, the unconscious is "knowledge which can't tolerate one's knowing that one knows" (Seminar, Feb. 19 1974)" (28)"The discovery of the unconscious...is that the implications of meaning infinitely exceed the signs manipulated by the individual" [S-II, 150] "As far as signs are concerned, man is always mobilizing many more of them than he knows" [S-II, 150]" (28)ignorance is not passive; it is "an active refusal of information" (29-30)"Teaching, like analysis, has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with resistances to knowledge" (30)""the passion for ignorance"... Ignorance, in other words is nothing other than a desire to ignore" (30)"ignorance itself can teach us something - become itself instructive" (30)"Textual knowledge - the very stuff the literature is supposed to deal in - is knowledge of the functioning of language, of symbolic structures, of the signifier, knowledge at once derived from - and directed towards - interpretation. But such knowledge cannot be acquired (or possessed) once and for all: each case, each text, has its own specific, singular symbolic functioning, and requires thus a different - an original - interpretation" (31)analysands as text (textual turn in psychoanalytic practice)"the position of alterity is therefore indispensable: knowledge is what is already there, but always in the Other. Knowledge... [is a] structural dynamic: it is not contained by any individual but comes about out of the mutual apprenticeship between two partially unconscious speeches which both say more than they know. Dialogue is thus the radical condition of learning and of knowledge, the analytically constitutive condition through which ignorance becomes structurally informative, knowledge is essentially, irreducibly dialogic" (33)alterity is one of the conditions of possibility for knowledge"The analysand is qualified to be an analyst as of the point at which he understands his own analysis to be inherently unfinished, incomplete, as of the point, that is, at which he settles into his own didactic analysis - or his own analytical apprenticeship - as fundamentally interminable. It is, in other words, as of the moment the student recognizes that learning has no term, that he can himself become a teacher, assume the position of the teacher. But the position of the teacher is itself the position of the one who learns, of the one who teaches nothing other than the way he learns. The subject of teaching is interminably - a student, the subject of teaching is interminably - a learning. This is the most radical, perhaps the most far-reaching insight psychoanalysis can give us into pedagogy" (37)interminability of interpretation: "a paradigm, precisely, of the interminability, not just of teaching [learning] and of analyzing [being analyzed], but of the very act of thinking, theorizing: of teaching, analyzing, thinking, theorizing, in such a way as to make of psychoanalysis "what is has never ceased to be: an act that is yet to come" (Lacan, 39)"Freud's text should thus itself be read as a poetic text" (42)"like the poets, he, too, cannot exhaust the meaning of his text - he too partakes of the poetic ignorance of his own knowledge" (42)"Freudian pedagogical imperative: the imperative to learn from and through the insight which does not know its own meaning, from and through the knowledge which is not entirely in mastery - in possession - of itself" (43)"pedagogically poetic: poetic in such a way as to raise, through every answer that it gives, the literary question of its non-mastery of itself" (44)"teaching, thus, with blindness" (44)