Pedagogy, Lacan, and the Freudian Subject

Abstract

The first number of this double special issue on psychoanalysis was devoted to a paradox, the way which activities like teaching, reading, and writing can be understood relation to the blockages, or breakdowns, that define their undoing. Important to pedagogy, as we discussed, is the sense which the teacher does not convey information to students but only helps students situate themselves a certain relation to knowledge. Important to reading, likewise, is the sense which (as a pure activity) it is impossible and only takes place as a distortion, misprision, or rewriting of texts. And important to writing is the sense which students cannot ever purely write but must work through an interpretive process that produces writing (actual texts) as only one of its effects. A major theme of the last number, thus, is echoed by Gregory Ulmer's statement about psychoanalytic blockages the current issue, that in psychoanalysis there is no cure without transference (which includes the problematic of resistance), and once the resistance has manifested itself it is possible to recognize it for what it is-ideology-and to deal with it a constructively critical way. Likewise, resistance to teaching and reading (to paraphrase Paul de Man), as we concluded, seems to constitute the very activity of teaching and reading. That is, the concept of resistance directs attention to the doing as opposed merely to the noting (or positing) of the results of doing, and one ignores the resistance to reading and teaching (the activity) only by vastly diminishing the expanse of what they are and how they function.