Session Information
13 SES 06 A, Classroom Pedagogy
Paper Session
Contribution
Much has been said concerning the singularity of the event in contemporary philosophy. From Derrida to Žižek its insistence is keenly felt, as it is through the works of Alain Badiou, Maurice Blanchot, Giles Deleuze, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy, to speak of only a few. But how have European philosophical models translated, transitioned or repositioned themselves as pedagogical models beyond their specific continental contexts?
This paper argues that the most important living proponent of continental philosophy in the English speaking world is John D. Caputo and that his extraordinary readings of Derrida, Nancy, Blanchot, and so on, are essential for anyone concerned with philosophies of education. His translations of European thinkers, I claim, are offering us the most exciting revisions of pedagogical philosophical thinking in the last several decades.
"A passion for the impossible" is what Caputo, like Derrida, sees as the pulse of deconstruction, the pulse of thinking as a passion for knowing, even (perhaps especially) when that knowing doesn’t know for sure in which direction it is travelling. This, I argue, is a striking way of imagining the task of educators today, especially those working in the humanities. What concerns me is that Caputo has spoken specifically of the event as a peculiar pedagogical predicament in a more recent interview for the journal JRCT. It is at this point that his thinking becomes important for my present purposes, since I will argue that John Williams’ novel Stoner is a brilliant exemplification of how teaching as event might be imagined (im-possibly) in fictional discourse and that that novel is a literary dramatisation of the arguments Caputo and contemporary philosophy on the event have passionately, knowingly or unknowingly envisioned.
In Caputo’s view the event of teaching is constantly surprising. We are often touched by what we know and do not know when we are involved in teaching and learning in ways which are not entirely comprehensible at the time of its happening. In what we say we touch ourselves and others. This touching is peculiar, perverse, peripatetic: the pedagogy is performative, perverformative, by which I mean it wanders away from us. In touching the event, being touched by it, Caputo’s work, we might say, is touching in its own singularity: in touching itself it touches us in a queerly expansive auto-hetero-affection, a touching that touches itself touching others as Derrida and Nancy’s reflexive solecism “se toucher toi” has it.
How can one respond responsibly to the event of learning, the shattering moment when one does not know, without sounding like a novice, without abandoning edification for thought, for stupidity? This shattering I am calling "unlearning", which is not an antonym for learning. It’s not that educators ought to acknowledge the limitations of what they can and cannot do, but that they become aware that what they do is unthinkable, at some level even impossible. I conclude, therefore, with the objection to knowing what it is that we are doing when this shattering occurs, that the most important thing we can know in our classes is that we don't know.
As a consequence, we must learn how to fail better, how to unlearn old habits, how to object to learning objectives and the insidious instrumentalism that is now sifting through every moment of teaching and learning. We must, I claim with Caputo, Williams, etc., resist objectives in order to become just teachers. We must learn to listen to the event. We must learn how to be weak.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Jacques Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and A Taste for the Secret trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); Slavoj Zizek’s Event: Philosophy in Transit (London: Penguin, 2014); Alain Badiou’s Being and Event trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Conyinuum, 2006) and Philosophy and the Event with Fabian Tarby (Cambridge: Polity, 2013) and also, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001); Maurice Blanchot’s Writing the Disaster trans. Ann Smock (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Giles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990); Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority trans. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne: Duquesne University Press, 1999); and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), John Williams, Stoner, Vintage Classics Edition (2012)
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