Teachers today are frequently exhorted to enact ‘evidence-based’ teaching. Such exhortations reflect a view of teaching as primarily rational. By contrast, psychoanalysis attends to what Eric Santner (2001) refers to as the constitutive ‘too muchness’ (p. 8), a ‘certain uncanny animation’ or ‘an undeadness’ (p. 18), that characterises our psychic life. In this reading, drive conveys the relentless pulse of the bodily real, ceaselessly moving around its object in a closed circuit with “no day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant force” (Lacan, 1981, p. 165). Yet drive is also singular in the sense that it reflects the particular ways in which we have been traumatised and thus corresponds to our idiosyncratic ‘truth’ – a truth “which appears to everyone in its intimate specificity…. Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judged from the outside” (Lacan, 1992, p. 24). This Lacanian reading of drive offers fertile ground for conceptualising agency and resistance, creativity and criticality, in teaching and education. Crucially, our capacity for singularity is tied up with the ‘too-muchness’ of our being and the ‘undead’ energy of the drives. In Mari Ruti’s memorable words, “singularity thus relates to those parts of the drive that manage to ooze through the sieve of the various systems of organisation that are designed to stabilise human life” (2012, p. 21). As such, singularity allows us to “touch the living tissue of the world rather than merely perceiving its socially mediated significations” (p. 28). In this sense, singularity becomes a matter of finding idiosyncratic and creative ways of infusing the energies of the drive into the symbolic orders of evidence-based policy and practice, so as to resist and undermine the latters’ more standardised and ‘verbose’ registers, reflected in what Taubman (2009) refers to as ‘teaching by numbers’. This reading has potential for a) resisting narrative closure, discursive colonisation or institutional totalisation; b) developing a willingness to question dominant assumptions and assertions; and c) cultivating an openness to expansive conceptual vocabularies and experimental narratives for thought and action in teachers’ professional practices.

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