Quem Seduz Quem - 18.06.2016

Grupo de Estudos Feminismo e a produo do espao
Reunio do dia 18/06/16

Tema
Quem seduz quem?
Textos neste documento
Morgado, Maria Aparecida. Autoridade e seduo na relao pedaggica. Psic.
da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130
Hull, Kathleen. EROS AND EDUCATION: THE ROLE OF DESIRE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING. THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL, 2002, p
19-31.
hooks, bell. Eros, eroticism and the pedagogical process. Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1993, v.7, n.1, p.59- 65.
JAGODZINSKI, JAN. IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL? SEX
SCANDALS, FAMILY ROMANCE, AND LOVE IN THE SCHOOL & ACADEMY.
Studies in Philosophy and Education 25 (2006): 335-362.
JUNHO. 2016
Autoridade e seduo na relao pedaggica1

Maria Aparecida Morgado
No Poema pedaggico, de 1935, Makarenko expe a seguinte questo:
A pedagogia, como se sabe, nega energicamente o amor, considerando que
esse s deve aparecer quando o fracasso da influncia educativa j se evidenciou
totalmente (1986, p. 76). O clebre pedagogo russo manifesta apreenso com
aquilo que tambm sabido na atualidade: a educao escolar leva quase que
exclusivamente em conta as habilidades intelectuais cognitivas implicadas no
ensino e na aprendizagem.
Essa orientao predominante pode ser observada em cursos de licenciatura,
voltados formao de professores, e tambm em cursos de formao tcnico-cientfica, como se v nas disciplinas pedaggicas de cursos de Psicologia.
dado por suposto que o professor rene as condies bsicas para ensinar, e o
enfoque quase exclusivo recai no aluno, ento concebido em termos racionais.
Geralmente, tal entendimento recorre Didtica, Metodologia de Ensino e
Psicologia de matizes cognitivo-construtivistas a fim de que lhe deem suportes
tericos e tcnicos.
Mas isso ainda pouco, pois a relao que o aluno trava com o saber elaborado precedida por sua relao com o professor. E essa relao humana no
tem como base estruturante a razo, ou a inteleco, mas, antes, a emoo. Uma
emoo que contrria regra, uma emoo irracional, uma emoo inconsciente
que no ocorre sem reciprocidade. Consequentemente, ao focalizar quase que
exclusivamente o aluno, o entendimento dominante mais encobre do que mostra
a relao pedaggica em sua complexidade.
Mesmo assim, em todos os seus nveis, a educao escolar alheia a esse
fato e tende a consider-lo somente como ltimo recurso, quando a prtica pedaggica fracassa em atingir sua finalidade: a apropriao do conhecimento pelo
aprendiz. Ento, atravs de um vis psicologista, a emoo inconsciente invocada
1 Este artigo uma verso modificada da conferncia proferida no III Colquio Estadual de Psicanlise
e Educao, ocorrido na Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB), em 26 e 27 de maio de 2011.
Alguns dos conceitos e argumentos abordados foram debatidos em artigo anterior da autora.
Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130
e o insucesso do trabalho educativo tende a ser atribudo a supostos transtornos

emocionais ou conflitos psquicos do aluno como se uns enfrentassem esses
conflitos na vida e outros no.
Entretanto, so comuns situaes em que o aluno no aprende porque o
docente no ensina adequadamente, pois alheio a elementos inconscientes que
interferem em como ele ensina. Tais elementos resultam de afetos inconscientes
que o aluno deposita no professor e a que o professor reage tambm inconscientemente. Desse intercmbio emocional configura-se um campo de comunicao
inconsciente no qual o passado infantil revivido na atualidade sem que os
sujeitos envolvidos se deem conta. O mesmo tambm ocorre em qualquer outra
relao humana, mas pode dificultar as finalidades da ao pedaggica e muitas
vezes inviabiliz-las. Os fins pedaggicos so alcanados quando a socializao
do conhecimento ascende ao plano central.
A autoridade do professor deriva de seu domnio dos contedos e de sua
competncia para ensinar e, portanto, estritamente pedaggica. Ele exerce essa
autoridade como mediador entre o aluno e os contedos culturais. Porm, caso a
relao se estruture de modo a privilegiar o intercmbio de afetos inconscientes
em detrimento do ensino, a mediao ser inadequada: outra autoridade, primordial e prototpica, tomar o lugar da autoridade pedaggica. A sobreposio
da autoridade primordial autoridade pedaggica resulta em seduo: mesmo
sem perceber, o professor oculta o conhecimento em vez de mostr-lo ao aluno.
A prtica docente calcada na seduo acoberta uma sutil e dissimulada
recusa em socializar os bens culturais. A seduo mais ou menos intelectualizada, mais ou menos erotizada intensifica o campo emocional da relao
pedaggica e resulta em uma forma abusiva de exerccio da autoridade, pois os
trabalhos de ensinar e aprender so secundarizados. Portanto, o problema pedaggico do autoritarismo est vinculado ao fenmeno psicanaltico da seduo.
Todavia, uma advertncia se faz necessria: como o docente pode exercer
sua autoridade adequadamente se vive em uma sociedade que dela vem abdicando? No ensino fundamental e no ensino mdio, muitas vezes o professor
visto pelos pais mais como um inimigo de seus filhos do que como algum responsvel por ajudar a inseri-los no processo civilizatrio pais que no querem
mais envelhecer e que, ao mesmo tempo, delegam a educao de seus filhos
quase que exclusivamente escola.
Em Tabus acerca do magistrio, da dcada de 1960, Adorno detecta a progressiva desvalorizao social do magistrio superior sob o capitalismo, fazendo
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interseces entre as teorias de Marx e de Freud. bem sabido que o Ensino

Superior brasileiro a incluindo programas de Ps-Graduao no escapa
quilo que ocorre na Educao Bsica: o exerccio da autoridade pedaggica tem
se tornado cada vez mais difcil, seja pelo contexto universitrio muitas vezes
desfavorvel, seja pela histria dos alunos, seja pelos exguos prazos a serem
cumpridos.
Em A cultura do narcisismo, de 1979, Christopher Lasch focaliza sua crtica filosfico-social ao capitalismo desenvolvido norte-americano centrado na
burocratizao. Conforme o autor, a personalidade autoritria, retratada em
estudos ps-guerra coordenados por Adorno, no mais a do fascista preconceituosamente intolerante e, sim, a do homem psicolgico centrado na prpria
individualidade sem interesse pelo futuro, perseguido pela ansiedade em lugar
da culpa na sociedade em que ocorreu a eroso da autoridade.
Em A corroso do carter, de 1999, Richard Sennett tambm focaliza criticamente o novo capitalismo norte-americano, agora centrado na reengenharia
das corporaes, nos trabalhos de curto prazo e em rede, na execuo de projetos e na flexibilidade. Segundo ele, o ambiente de trabalho mais humano das
empresas esconde consequncias pessoais que impedem a formao do carter:
o progressivo desaparecimento de virtudes estveis como lealdade, confiana,
comprometimento em longo prazo e ajuda mtua no permite que se desenvolvam experincias nem narrativas de vida coerentes: da derivaria a corroso
do carter que intitula sua obra.
maneira do pensamento filosfico e social, a complexa problemtica da
autoridade tambm tem sido abordada por prestigiosas tendncias pedaggicas modernas, tais como: Pedagogia Tradicional, Pedagogia Nova, Pedagogia
Tecnicista, Pedagogia Crtica e Pedagogia Construtivista. O mesmo ocorre com
didticas, metodologias de ensino e tecnologias auxiliares. No contexto em que
a escola est cada vez mais assemelhada ao tipo de empresa caracterizada por
Richard Sennett, a identidade profissional do professor tambm focalizada
(PIMENTA, 2009). Tambm vem ganhando relevo a formao continuada de
professores.
Em que pesem os esforos empreendidos pelo pensamento educacional,
o problema da autoridade pedaggica persevera sem equacionamento, e isso
materializado nas polticas governamentais correlatas: no h nelas nada que
indique a considerao do campo inconsciente que estrutura a relao professor-aluno. As condies objetivas do trabalho pedaggico se do nesse vcuo, pleno
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de sentido histrico e social. Mas, o docente responsabilizado por suas aes

pedaggicas como sujeito individual. E no poderia ser diferente, mesmo que as
aes conscientes sejam atravessadas por determinantes psquicos inconscientes.
Entre exercer a autoridade ou alimentar a seduo, qual a escolha docente?
Certamente, correr o risco e errar no exerccio dessa paradoxal autoridade menos
danoso do que a segunda alternativa. Apresentam-se, a seguir, os processos
psquicos inconscientes que constituem a seduo.
***
A seduo deriva da relao original travada pela criana com seus genitores.
A relao original entendida pela psicanlise como fundadora da personalidade
psquica e prottipo das relaes sociais subsequentes. Nela, a sexualidade-afetividade infantil vai se estruturando no campo da sexualidade-afetividade
dos pais, adultos j constitudos e, por isso mesmo, mais ativos: esse momento
primordial instaura o processo de seduo, que tem como origem uma cena
primria de seduo. A cena primria de seduo no decorre necessariamente
de situaes em que um adulto perverso tenha imposto prticas sexuais precoces criana, que nem pode entender o significado delas, mas, geralmente, de
fragmentos de cenas e coisas ouvidas que a fantasia infantil alimentada pela
pulso sexual transforma na cena primria de seduo.
No par sedutor-seduzido, o beb ocupa inicialmente o polo mais passivo e
tem nessa desigualdade sua primeira relao de autoridade. Mas a criana seduzida tambm seduz: alm das sensaes prazerosas que os cuidados dos adultos
lhe propiciam demandado seu amor e sua obedincia ela tambm os seduz
demandando prazer e amor. O desenrolar dessa relao em que a seduo e a
autoridade se constituem a um s tempo est calcado na identificao, processo
inconsciente por meio do qual a criana introjeta caractersticas psquicas dos
pais tomados como modelos de ser humano.
O entendimento da relao original como prototpica das demais relaes
permite estabelecer os elos entre as experincias iniciais da criana e a seduo
que se instaura na relao pedaggica. Especialmente na questo da autoridade,
a identificao do aluno com o professor depende de como foram estruturadas
e de como foram superadas as fixaes da relao original dos polos envolvidos.
Resulta que descontextualizadas de sua cena de ao a relao original de
autoridade e a seduo podem ser reeditadas no lugar da relao pedaggica.
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Quando a seduo se sobrepe ao trabalho intelectual, duas operaes

psicolgicas inconscientes so necessrias: a transferncia de afetos da relao
passada que o aluno deposita no professor e a contratransferncia, que a reao inconsciente do professor a esses afetos. A contratransferncia acarreta uma
forma abusiva de exerccio da autoridade, pois os objetivos pedaggicos so
substitudos pela revivescncia inconsciente recproca. Essa questo educacional
anima o recorte terico estabelecido e o intento de mostrar como a interveno
desses afetos pode obstruir os fins do trabalho docente.
***
Identificao a operao psicolgica inconsciente a partir da qual o sujeito
infantil se constitui psiquicamente tomando os pais como modelos de ser humano
e implica a mais primitiva forma de lao emocional. Instala-se antes da relao
de objeto propriamente dita; ou seja, antes da diferenciao psquica do ego a
partir do id, momento em que os objetos de amor e de destrutividade so situados
como independentes do ego. Portanto, a identificao primitiva se d antes da
configurao do complexo de dipo.
No momento subsequente da diferenciao psquica, catexias libidinais
so voltadas para o objeto. Um dos genitores ou ambos, aos quais a criana se
ligou inicialmente pela identificao primitiva agora tomado como objeto
do amor sexual. O processo culmina no conflitivo complexo de dipo que, na
sua forma simplificada, implica destinar agressividade ao genitor adotado como
obstculo posse daquele que tido como objeto sensual. Mas, de fato, o genitor
adotado como obstculo, assim como a interdio cultural do incesto que ele
representa, impede a posse do genitor tido como objeto sexual. Alm disso, a
criana ainda no tem as condies fsicas e psquicas que lhe permitiriam levar
a termo essa sua primeira eflorescncia da sexualidade.
Outra sada ter de ser encontrada. Uma parte das pulses erticas dirigidas ao objeto de amor sensual e uma parte das catexias pulsionais destrutivas dirigidas ao objeto da rivalidade hostil sofrer a ao do recalcamento.
Outra parte dessas pulses ser sublimada em interesses socialmente valorizados,
aparentemente destitudos de contedos sexuais e destrutivos. Na conscincia,
predominaro os sentimentos ternos de respeito e afeio da identificao primitiva, agora compensatoriamente intensificados.
Desse modo, a renncia ao erotismo e destrutividade que propicia a
resoluo edpica implica uma regresso identificao original, ou primitiva, na
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qual inexistia a relao objetal. Dito de outro modo, na identificao primitiva a

libido narcsica ou libido do ego ainda no havia se voltado para o objeto. Esse
segundo momento do processo identificatrio, em que os sentimentos originrios
so intensificados regressivamente, denominado identificao secundria ou
regressiva e tambm concorre para a formao do ego.
Nesse processo, no apenas o ego sempre em busca da impossvel
harmonia entre os interesses pulsionais do id e as exigncias da realidade que
se constitui a partir das identificaes. No interior do prprio ego, outra instncia psquica tambm se diferencia. Essa outra instncia o superego: tambm
herdeiro das identificaes, ele realiza as funes de auto-observao do ego,
de conscincia moral que julga, sanciona e interdita a ao do ego sobre o
mundo e de avaliao do ego em relao a um ego que seria ideal. Aos poucos,
o superego vai se estruturando como uma instncia psquica separada do ego
de que se originou.
O superego deriva sua fora da identificao original e do complexo de
dipo, bem como da posio destacada que passa a ocupar em relao ao ego.
A instncia superegoica se constitui e se fortalece porque durante o recalcamento pulsional, ocorrido na identificao regressiva ele assimilou a rigidez e
a severidade das imagos parentais introjetadas que passaram a ocupar o lugar
das catexias libidinais abandonadas pelo id. Portanto, a instalao do superego
fruto da dessexualizao decorrente da bem-sucedida identificao com a autoridade parental: representa a internalizao da coero cultural que antes era
exercida de fora, nos primrdios do processo de diferenciao psquica, quando
desconhecendo a diferena sexual anatmica a criana no podia estabelecer
distino entre a me e o pai.
No apenas identificao com as imagos parentais que o superego deve
sua configurao. Ele tambm assimila identificaes com pessoas que passam
a ocupar o lugar da autoridade dos pais. Ainda que tambm concorram para o
enriquecimento do carter ou personalidade psquica , essas identificaes
subsequentes no produzem alteraes substantivas nas primeiras, h muito
enraizadas e responsveis pelas caractersticas essenciais da instncia superegoica.
Consideradas as caractersticas psquicas introjetadas a partir da relao identificatria original e aquelas introjetadas a partir das identificaes posteriores,
compreende-se porque o superego responsvel pela continuidade de tradies
e pela manuteno de iderios polticos.
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Porm, nem toda severidade, rigidez e conservadorismo do superego infantil

so extrados do superego parental. Herdeiro do complexo de dipo, o superego
se estrutura na estreita dependncia de como se desenrolou esse conflito triangular. Quanto mais intensas as demandas erticas e as demandas destrutivas,
mais o superego se avoluma para cont-las na contribuio por ele prestada ao
recalcamento que propicia dissoluo edpica. Desse modo, a configurao do
superego depende de como as pulses destrutiva e ertica foram sendo equacionadas, metamorfoseando-se em identificaes.
A dinmica da relao entre o ego e o superego, assim como a presso que o
segundo possa exercer sobre o primeiro, depende de como as identificaes neles
se imprimiram e de como nesse jogo de foras o ego consegue se posicionar
diante da realidade. Todavia, esse complexo processo no se d em um nvel que
possa ser apreendido pela conscincia. O respeito e a afeio conscientes pelos
pais dada a total dependncia inicial expressam a nica posio que a criana
pde ter diante deles: a submisso. A fim de preservar a integridade do ego,
geralmente no resta no psiquismo a mais remota lembrana das implacveis
paixes antagnicas ocultas por detrs desses sentimentos cvicos.
Os genitores so primeiramente tomados como modelos daquilo que a
criana gostaria de ser, no respeito e na afeio submissos. Paradigmticos, os pais
so em seguida transformados naquilo que a criana gostaria de ter: para amar e/
ou para destruir. Nessa segunda posio diferenciada, o lao no se prende mais
ao sujeito e, sim, aos objetos das pulses ertica e destrutiva. O conflito psquico
resultante impe o recalcamento e a sublimao dos intensos sentimentos edipianos, concomitantemente intensificao regressiva da identificao original.
Desse modo, a diferenciao psquica do ego e do superego a partir do id est
calcada no ininterrupto ir-e-vir das pulses ertica e destrutiva, ora inibidas ora
desinibidas em suas finalidades, ora mescladas uma na outra.
O ego e o superego operam inconscientemente para poderem suportar
as intensas presses a que so constantemente submetidos: de um lado, as
exigncias da realidade, de outro, as persistentes demandas pulsionais do id.
Originariamente inconsciente, o id sempre alheio realidade exterior, distino
entre o passado e o presente, moral cultural e contradio. Norteado pelo
princpio de prazer, o id empenha-se to somente na luta pela descarga pulsional
a qualquer custo. por causa disso que a maior parte do psiquismo humano
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inconsciente. As identificaes que o diferenciam e estruturam deixam no

ego e no superego o precipitado daquilo que deve ser esquecido e daquilo que
pode ser lembrado.
Outra modalidade de identificao concorre para o enriquecimento do
psiquismo. Trata-se da identificao parcial ou terciria na qual no est
implicado investimento libidinal de objeto. Derivada da percepo de caractersticas partilhadas com outras pessoas, essa terceira modalidade de identificao
propicia os laos de amizade, a formao de grupos, os pertencimentos tnicos,
classistas, profissionais e, portanto, o desenvolvimento dos sentimentos sociais.
Desse modo, calcada nas pulses sexual e destrutiva inibidas em suas finalidades, a identificao terciria favorece os sentimentos cvicos a partir dos quais
as formaes sociais se estabelecem e podem se consolidar.
Devido s suas bases erticas e destrutivas inibidas, os sentimentos cvicos das relaes sociais podem, com facilidade, se transformar em sensualidade
ou hostilidade: nesses casos, a pulso desinibida se sobrepe pulso inibida.
Essa plasticidade do intercmbio pulsional permite que a ternura e o respeito
se transformem em erotismo ou dio e vice-versa , como, por exemplo, se
v na amizade metamorfoseada em relao ertica, ou no erotismo e na destrutividade metamorfoseados em amizade. Mesmo assim, preciso distinguir a
identificao do amor sensual e da hostilidade. A identificao na sua infuso
com a sensualidade e com a destrutividade sublimadas que permite as amizades e as formaes coletivas. O mesmo no ocorre com o amor sensual e com
a hostilidade que so desfavorveis convivncia grupal.
Identificao original, ou primitiva, identificao regressiva, ou secundria, e identificao parcial, ou terciria, constituem a personalidade psquica no
processo em que o ego e o superego se diferenciam do id. A estrutura dessas
duas instncias psquicas diferenciadas, assim como o jogo de foras entre elas,
decorre dos sentimentos heterogneos que so alimentados pelas pulses ertica
e destrutiva ora inibidas, ora desinibidas. Impedidas de concretizao devido
ao recalque ocorrido na dissoluo edpica , essas intensas demandas pulsionais fazem presso para atingir a representao consciente. Isso ocorre porque
a identificao submissa com a autoridade e o recalque implicaram frustrao
permanente e incansvel tentativa de concretizar a satisfao adiada.
Prottipo das demais relaes sociais, a relao original reeditada a cada
nova relao travada pelo sujeito que movido por demandas pulsionais outrora
frustradas. Quando se fundem relao original, quando a ela se somam, quando
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a ela se sobrepem ou quando a substituem parcialmente, as relaes atuais arcam

com os sentimentos ambivalentes da primeira e com os conflitos provocados por
esse antagonismo pulsional constitutivo. assim que a coexistncia de ternura,
afeio, respeito, sensualidade e agressividade representa a herana emocional
imposta relao atual de autoridade pela relao original.
***
Transferncia a operao psicolgica por meio da qual os afetos da relao
original so reeditados inconscientemente na relao atual. Portanto, a relao
original determina o modo como o sujeito se pe nas suas novas relaes. Os
prottipos relacionais que vm cena podem ser reequacionados, conforme o
permitam as caractersticas intrapsquicas da relao presente e as circunstncias
exteriores.
Observe-se que a relao de autoridade apenas uma das muitas em que
pode se dar revivescncia do prottipo originrio. A relao de autoridade
fundamental para a problemtica aqui analisada porque, como se viu, a extrema
dependncia inicial e o contato quase exclusivo com os genitores ou com pessoas que cumpram essa mesma funo impem criana submisso: somente
queles que dela cuidam pode destinar toda sua ternura, toda sua sensualidade,
toda sua agressividade e todo seu respeito, porque somente eles podem prover
ou frustrar suas necessidades.
A relao original de autoridade estrutura e canaliza os variados sentimentos humanos, representando o polo em torno do qual so configurados todos os
demais prottipos relacionais. Por causa disso, a relao primitiva de autoridade
monopoliza o conjunto dos interesses emocionais ulteriores, criando as condies psicolgicas que propiciam da reatualizao transferencial. O sujeito no
precisaria retornar ao momento infantil em que suas demandas pulsionais foram
interditadas se tivesse podido satisfaz-las.
A pulso entendida pela psicanlise como conceito limtrofe entre o somtico e o psquico. A fonte pulsional provm das imperiosas necessidades corporais
que ao provocarem tenso enviam sinais ao psiquismo e se transformam em
representaes. As pulses so determinantes do curso da vida ertica humana:
aps uma evoluo aleatria e complexa, elas se organizam sob o primado da
genitalidade que culmina na puberdade segunda eflorescncia da sexualidade.
Essa sinuosa organizao pulsional vai se engendrando em regies especficas do corpo. No incio da vida psquica, a pulso sexual constituda de uma
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srie de pulses parciais que buscam satisfao independentemente umas das

outras. Em seguida, essas pulses convergem para as regies mais estimuladas
do corpo denominadas zonas ergenas. Em linhas gerais, primeiramente convergem para a regio oral, depois, para a regio anal e, por fim, para a regio
genital. A subordinao pulsional genitalidade no suplanta a fora das pulses
parciais: assim como se integram genitalidade, dela tambm se desprendem; ou,
ento, se rebelam contra qualquer sistematizao. Portanto, o desenvolvimento
centrado na genitalidade marcado pela mutabilidade e polimorfia pulsional.
Os representantes psquicos de pulses genitalmente subordinadas e os
representantes psquicos de pulses sublimadas so admitidos na conscincia.
Os representantes de pulses parciais rebeldes so vetados pela personalidade
consciente. Geralmente, tocam a conscincia quando expressos em fantasias.
Mas a ao do recalcamento no suficiente para conter a presso que tambm
fazem para ascender sem disfarces a esse nvel psquico: atingem parcialmente
seus objetivos pulsionais quando a relao presente atualiza a relao original.
A reedio do prottipo relacional depende da medida em que a pessoa
em questo amigo, amante, chefe, professor se adequa a uma das sries
psquicas j constitudas pelo sujeito. Essa incluso da pessoa na srie psquica
pode derivar de modelos correspondentes s imagos de pai, me, irm e irmo,
dentre outras. Dessa forma, a atualizao do prottipo relacional se d no nvel
da representao consciente calcada em representaes inconscientes. Emoes
vividas como derivadas da relao atual decorrem de pulses cuja representao
foi banida da conscincia.
A libido expresso psquica da pulso sexual agora clama pela satisfao
interditada no estgio anterior do desenvolvimento infantil. A adequao de
outra pessoa srie psquica j constituda possvel porque, por natureza, os
processos inconscientes desconhecem a lgica norteadora dos processos conscientes. Para as demandas pulsionais do inconsciente que o reino do ilgico, da
amoralidade, da atemporalidade e da convivncia dos contrrios indiferente
que se trate de outra relao e de outro momento da vida.
As condies presentes geralmente concorrem para que a relao originria no seja fielmente reproduzida na relao atual. No entanto, a frustrao
de intensas demandas erticas provocou intensa hostilidade: que pode ser direcionada para o objeto de amor ou para o objeto oponente. Portanto, quaisquer
que sejam as combinaes estabelecidas, a relao atual arca com a transferncia
inconsciente dos sentimentos ambivalentes da relao original.
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A ambivalncia emocional que remonta ao clmax do conflito edipiano

decorre da coexistncia de um investimento libidinal amoroso e de um investimento hostil dirigidos para a mesma pessoa: sentimentos de amor e de dio
concorrem na constituio do sujeito e de seus objetos. As demandas pulsionais
ambivalentes coabitariam pacificamente se permanecessem no inconsciente.
Como foram passagem para a conscincia, produzem o conflito emocional to
caracterstico das relaes humanas.
Sendo assim, o a priori afetivo dos relacionamentos humanos implica concomitante revivescncia de amor e de dio. A intensidade e a natureza desses
afetos determina se a transferncia favorece ou dificulta as finalidades da nova
relao. Quando predominantemente alimentada por brandos sentimentos
de ternura, a transferncia positiva favorece as finalidades relacionais. Quando
predominantemente alimentada por intensos sentimentos erticos, a transferncia positiva dificulta a relao cujas finalidades no sejam sexuais. Quando
predominantemente alimentada por intensos sentimentos hostis, a transferncia
negativa dificulta as finalidades relacionais.
As relaes ulteriores de autoridade evocam as identificaes mais primitivas porque, de um modo ou de outro, tambm envolvem dependncia e
submisso. Efetivamente responsvel pela sobrevivncia do frgil beb, o adulto
se imps a ele como autoridade naquele momento inaugural da vida psquica.
Como se viu, esse prottipo relacional alimenta-se da intensa ambivalncia
decorrente da frustrao. assim que a relao atual de autoridade arca com a
transferncia positiva, de ternura e de sensualidade, assim como com a transferncia negativa de hostilidade.
***
Contratransferncia a reao psicolgica inconsciente daquele que alvo
da transferncia. O alvo da transferncia tambm passou por um processo de
constituio psicossexual anlogo ao do agente da transferncia. Por causa
disso, reage aos sentimentos primitivos que lhe so destinados porque tambm
vivenciou a ternura e o respeito da identificao original com seus genitores.
Em seguida, tambm os transformou em objetos sensuais e hostis que teve de
abandonar compelido pelo recalque e pela intensificao dos sentimentos cvicos
da identificao originria.
O depositrio da transferncia tambm enfrentou frustrao de demandas
erticas e hostis que foram recalcadas para assegurar a frgil integridade do seu
123
ego, ameaado por presses antagnicas precariamente conciliadas: exigncias

do id, limitaes da realidade e exigncias do superego. A estrutura libidinal
ambivalente e nostlgica da resultante expe seu inconsciente ao dos afetos
que lhe so destinados. Ao reagir inconscientemente, atualiza fixaes, desenterra
prottipos relacionais e revolve conflitos primitivos.
A reao contratransferencial transferncia completa o campo inconsciente que articula os sujeitos envolvidos. As relaes humanas no seriam
possveis sem a constituio do campo transferencial, pois elas dependem dessa
base intrapsquica. As relaes de autoridade intensificam o campo transferencial
porque evocam a revivescncia de sentimentos ambivalentes da relao original.
Como as demais relaes sociais geralmente envolvem dependncia e/ou submisso, tambm tendem a provocar revivescncia recproca desses sentimentos.
A transferncia e a contratransferncia produzem, paradoxalmente, uma
situao problemtica com a qual os polos envolvidos tm de arcar. O campo
transferencial foi primeiramente detectado na relao analtica que visa dissoluo da transferncia; dito de outro modo, a cura do paciente resulta do
manejo da transferncia pelo analista. Ao contrrio disso, os demais contextos
relacionais geralmente estimulam a reedio recproca de imagos parentais transformadas em ideais. Nessas outras relaes, os prottipos originais podem ser
ressignificados, mesmo que para isso no concorra qualquer esforo consciente
dos sujeitos envolvidos.
As relaes institucionalizadas de autoridade apresentam peculiaridades
que dificultam a percepo do campo transferencial. A prvia definio institucional hierrquica de funo acentua o componente de autoridade daquele
que tem mais a dizer e melhor sabe o que fazer , antecipando a transferncia e
a contratransferncia. Tal antecipao dissimula os afetos recprocos, e a relao
travada como se o campo transferencial a precedesse.
***
A seduo na relao professor-aluno deriva do campo transferencial. O contexto dessa relao produz expectativas transferenciais e contratransferenciais que
evocam prottipos identificatrios dos envolvidos. O professor formalmente
investido de autoridade pela escola e pela sociedade , independentemente de
sua competncia real para educar. Da maneira anloga que a autoridade para
educar os filhos juridicamente conferida aos pais, tenham eles condies para
isso ou no.
124
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.
125
Concomitantemente, o recalque produz a intensificao regressiva dos afetos

cvicos originrios a fim de que no restem sinais conscientes da ambivalncia
subjacente. Devido a isso, ao mesmo tempo em que define seu lugar no mundo
como um lugar sexual, a criana tambm baliza o curso de suas atividades
investigativas posteriores.
O desejo de saber e o desejo de no querer saber esto vinculados aos
caminhos e descaminhos do complexo de dipo. Se o recalcamento no foi demasiado intenso, representantes psquicos pulsionais sublimados podem ascender
conscincia metamorfoseados em curiosidade intelectual: estar aberto investigao implica, em ltima instncia, querer saber da prpria sexualidade. Se, ao
contrrio, o recalcamento foi demasiado intenso, dificulta a expresso consciente
de disfarces pulsionais sublimatrios. Os representantes psquicos vetados tero
de permanecer inconscientes: estar fechado investigao, implica, em ltima
instncia, no querer saber da prpria sexualidade, pois uma simples pergunta
pode ser perigosa para o ego.
O recalque do conflito edipiano abranda, mas no suprime a intensidade
dos afetos ambivalentes e da curiosidade sexual, relegados aos subterrneos da
vida psquica. Nesse momento, a instncia superegoica recebe uma nova contribuio: de objetos de amor e destruio, os pais retornam condio de modelos
ideais a partir dos quais o ego ser permanentemente avaliado pelo superego.
A seduo consuma a sua vitria, impondo instncia superegoica o fascnio
submisso s imagos parentais: ao internalizar suas exigncias para obter amor,
o superego infantil sedutoramente mostra que digno de receber esse amor.
Consequentemente, as expectativas do sujeito em relao a si e a outrem passam
pelo crivo da identificao originria.
O campo transferencial que inaugura a relao professor-aluno no deve
constituir seu ponto de chegada. As energias libidinais e destrutivas, aprisionadas reedio prototpica, precisam ser liberadas e canalizadas para o trabalho
intelectual. Quando revive o amor e/ou o dio, o aluno revive o momento em
que fascinado e atemorizado vergou-se autoridade parental assimilando
suas caractersticas supergoicas restritivas. Aprisionado paixo ambivalente pelo
professor, o aluno debilita a funo crtica de seu superego e o conhecimento fica
relegado a plano secundrio: a influncia parental toma o lugar da influncia
pedaggica e a transferncia reitera a seduo.
Quando reage transferncia do aluno, o professor opera como se os afetos
que lhe so destinados tivessem sido evocados exclusivamente por ele. A um s
126
tempo, atende s prprias fixaes infantis e s do aluno, seduzindo-o a realizar

suas expectativas de amor e/ou de dio: a seduo parental suplanta a autoridade pedaggica. Nessa forma abusiva de exerccio da autoridade, a mediao
pedaggica e a curiosidade intelectual so substitudas pela seduo recproca.
A dominao sedutora da autoridade original rompida quando o professor no reage s expectativas transferenciais ambivalentes do aluno e evoca seus
afetos ternos para ajud-lo a trabalhar. Ele tambm pode se abster de alimentar
a transferncia ertica. Tais modos de ao genuinamente pedaggica propiciam a predominncia de afeio e respeito, criando condies favorveis para
que o campo transferencial e a seduo que dele emana favoream o ensino e a
aprendizagem. Nessas situaes ideais, o professor d relevo ao conhecimento
que legitima sua autoridade pedaggica.
Est posta a questo decisiva da relao pedaggica. Mesmo que vise
negao da prpria relao operando para superar a dependncia intelectual
do aluno o professor sempre se move na tnue fronteira entre autoridade e
seduo. A sobreposio da seduo autoridade leva exclusiva revivescncia
de demandas pulsionais recprocas, desfigurando a relao pedaggica naquilo
que seu meio e sua finalidade: ensino e autonomia intelectual do estudante.
Portanto, necessrio diferenciar dois modos de negao da relao professor-aluno. Quando predominam amor e/ou dio muito intensos e recprocos, a relao negada porque professor e aluno no conseguem se articular na experincia
de ensino e aprendizagem. Quando predominam sentimentos brandos de afeto
e respeito, a relao pedaggica tambm negada, porm dialeticamente: ela
se desfaz no exato momento em que consuma suas finalidades.
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
127
conceitualmente, em termos psicanalticos, para mostrar como o processo em que se

articulam pode resultar na seduo. Quando a revivescncia inconsciente muito intensa
e exclusiva, a seduo se sobrepe autoridade desfigurando o ensino e a aprendizagem.
Palavras-chave: autoridade; seduo; identificao; transferncia; contratransferncia.
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.
128
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
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
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.
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Lasch, C. (1983 [1979]). A cultura do narcisismo: a vida americana numa era de

esperanas em declnio. Trad. de Ernani Pavaneli Moura. Rio de Janeiro,
Imago, 1983.
Makarenko, A. S. (1985 [1935]). Poema pedaggico. So Paulo, Editora Brasiliense,
vol. I e II.
Monzani, L. R. (1984). Seduo e fantasia. Manuscrito Revista de Filosofia.
Campinas, SP, n. 1 e 2, pp. 31-52.
Morgado, M. A. (2002). Da seduo na relao pedaggica: professor-aluno no embate
com afetos inconscientes. 2. ed. So Paulo, Summus.
Pimenta, S. G. (2009). Formao de Professores: identidade e saberes da
docncia. In: Pimenta, S. G. (org.). Saberes pedaggicos e atividade docente.
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capitalismo. Rio de Janeiro/So Paulo, Record.
Maria Aparecida Morgado

Docente do Departamento de Psicologia da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso.
E-mail: morgadom@terra.com.br
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Studies in Philosophy and Education (2006) 25:335362

DOI 10.1007/s11217-006-9000-8
Springer 2006
JAN JAGODZINSKI
IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL? SEX

SCANDALS, FAMILY ROMANCE, AND LOVE IN THE
SCHOOL & ACADEMY
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
When it comes to sex scandals, does diabolical evil exist in our

classrooms? And, if so, how might we theorize it so as to better grasp
its occurrence? In a school or academic setting, given that the couples
Fall from grace is so vehemently enforced by authority, can the very
idea of an ethics be culled from such an act? The very thought
sounds outrageous. The exploration of such a dicult question will
proceed by examining several high prole sex-scandals that have
taken place in both the school andthe academy, as well as a look at
popular lm, so that the question of seduction and power that shapes
the discourses of knowledge transference might be problematized
within such extreme cases.
The Law, on the other hand, is quite specic in its letter and
judgment regarding the misconduct of teachers who bed their students, charged with sexual abuse and professional misconduct. The
approach taken here is to problematize and explore this Law where
moral and theological discourses readily come to mind when issues of
evil arise, as well as to approach the unsaid of discourse, that is to
say, unconscious desire in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis specically through the psychic register of the Real. What Lacan meant by
336
JAN JAGODZINSKI
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.
THE FAMILY ROMANCE: POST-OEDIPAL

CONSIDERATIONS
In a brilliantly nuanced paper, which is now over a decade old, but
having lost none of its contemporaneous urgency, Taubman (1990)
usefully questioned from a Lacanian psychoanalytic viewpoint, what
should be the right distance in a pedagogical relationship between
teacher and student? Summatively put, the socially sanctioned
unconscious space of the student emerges right where one would expect
it to in a public school: nestled in the middle of an Oedipal triangle, the
student parenthetically occupying a space between his or her representative parents: the male teacher as father and the female teacher as
mother. This is the family romance, which is lived out in the classroom
as a love of children. Embedded in this romance is an emotional distance necessary to enforce disciplinary action in order to socialize
children. Teachers are mandated to be in loco parentis which means the
transmittance of culture in the curriculum (as Bildung, paideia, Kyoyo)
equated as the reproduction of domus (the family). Female teachers
predominately occupy positions in early childhood and elementary
schooling, while male teachers predominately specialize in subject
areas, meaning they are more likely to teach high school and more often
strive for administrative posts than their female colleagues. Despite the
gendered critiques by feminists of all persuasions this situation
demographically has remained largely unchanged.
What happens when this family romance goes awry? When this
socially sanctioned right distance collapses and socially accepted
love is skewed toward the bedroom? Given that power and seduction
inform the enactment of the dominant western view of pedagogical
authority as read within the context of this lived family romance
(Oedipalization) in the classroom (jagodzinski, 1996), a binary is
reproduced where power, as a masculine response, is mirrored by its
complement, feminine seduction. In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms,
IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?
337
the discourses of power and seduction interpellate subject positions

that are not to be thought of as strictly biological givens: as male/
female, although the dominant symbolic order continues to treat
them as such. A male can equally be a seducer (homme fatale) like the
gure of Byrons Don Jaun, as can a female be considered a Master
and hence powerful and domineering, like Margaret Iron Lady
Thatcher. However, even here such a Master is inected unequally
as Mistress or phallic woman (Grosz, 1992). When it comes to school
and college sex scandals, this sex-gendered confusion becomes even
more apparent since it is often unclear who seduced whom, and who
really had power over whom an elementary Foucauldian point
that troubles this binary distinction.
The Law, of course does not see it this way. The default position is
always the teacher or professor who is considered guilty. The female
teachers authority inected as a Mistress rather than a Master
already suggests a discursive pedagogical perversion. Said a little
dierently, the power position of teacher authority in normative
heterosexual pedagogical discourse is coded hegemonically as masculine. It leads to a Mastery where the proper distance between
student and teacher remains a perpetual chasm; the student, like a
slave, can never become a Master, until of course, a ritualized graduation takes place. But, even earning a PhD still requires symbolic
recognition amongst peers and a position within an institution of
higher learning. On the other hand, the seductive position leads to the
disappearance of proper distance where teacher and student can
ultimately become erotically and sexually intimate. It is coded as
feminine. The pedagogical relationship becomes erased since lawfully
acceptable pedagogical transference is no longer possible. The former
position, as the Law claims, is that of the familiar classic Western
pedagogy which equates pedagogy of the Father with pederasty
where, as Gallop (1988) sarcastically put it, a greater man penetrates
a lesser man with his knowledge (43), but does so with indierence
as an expression of hom(m)o-sexuality to the gender of the relationship (see Irigaray, 1985a, p. 171; Bedbeck, 1995, p. 170; Halperin,
1990, pp. 144145). The later position initiates the seduction of the
Mother who passes on her (sexual) secrets to her daughter(s) or even
incestuously covets (sleeps with) her children.
Such a convenient binary breaks down in post-Oedipal relationships where the teacherstudent hierarchy is no longer governed by
the domus of family bliss. One possible explanation as to why such
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JAN JAGODZINSKI
sex-scandals are more predominant in postmodernity is that the age

dierentiations are breaking down between teacher and student.
Youth as a category, developmentally speaking, is no longer easy to
distinguish. The distance between teacher and student collapses as
cultural values, dress codes, and types of entertainment begin to blur
(see jagodzinski, 2004). It seems that a re-examination is required
when it comes to the transferences and countertransferences of love
and hate that take place in these post-Oedipal relationships where
notions of family have been decentered.
THE DANGERS OF WIELDING THE PHALLUS
The possession of the phallus in male dominated societies places a
particular ethical burden on the male when it comes to student
teacher relationship that draws on the historical roots as to the
meaning of pedagogy itself, which is perceived to be always already
an unequal relationship. The teacher is supposed to be a moral guide
who leads the pupil to proper and acceptable conduct and wisdom.
Teacher power is therefore already hierarchically and structurally
invested in the Law. Any sexual exchanges between student and
teacher are taken as fundamentally damaging to the self-esteem of the
student, and are the grounds for dismissal and possible incarceration.
Historically, this has been premised on a relationship where the male
is perceived as the aggressor with the under-aged female falling victim
to his lechery. This is particularly blatant when it comes to cases of
statutory rape where the blame for the aair is immediately placed on
the male perpetrator regardless of how sexually willing his underaged partner may have been. The Law nds the under-aged partner
innocent regardless of circumstance. In the History of Sexuality,
Foucault (1980) identied such a lecherous gure, discursively
emerging during the nineteenth century as a symbol of moral folly,
genital neurosis and physical imbalance (40).
One of the most sensational cases of such lechery occurred in
Australia, at the University of Tasmania, Hobart in the mid 1950s
and eventually oered up as a movie, Gross Misconduct, written by
Lance Peters and released in Australia in 1993. Sydney Sparkes Orr, a
Philosophy Professor became sexually involved with one of his students, Suzanne Kemp who was eighteen at the time. Her adult status,
however, didnt seem to matter, just as in a statutory rape charge. Orr
was brought to trial and promptly dismissed from his post in 1956 by
339
no less a governing authority than the Supreme Court, and on a

failed appeal, by the High Court. Only with the support of the
Australian Federal Council of University Sta Associations (FCUSA) could a loophole be found: the grounds of wrongful dismissal
had been a violation of his tenure contract. Orr, very ill and having
lost public support, eventually settled with the university in 1965
only to die a year later. Susie OBrien (2000) provides an interesting
account of the Orr case, along with extensive literature written about
the incident, which blossomed in the early 1990s. What emerged from
the Supreme Court ruling of Justice Green was that Orr had failed in
his duty to maintain a dispassionate and detached emotional attitude
toward his student, and thereby took advantage of his authority to
seduce her. Orr, on the other hand, did not believe in such a pedagogical model. He interpreted Platos pedagogy to be pastoral so that
a dialectical self could be molded and transformed (see Cummings,
1991; Fox Keller, 1985; Irigaray, 1985b, pp. 293294). He forged
intense relationships with his students with discussions taking place
o campus, at parties, in the student lounge and in Hobart pubs, and
through meetings of the University Socratic Club, where Suzanne was
the secretary. Such settings promoted the likelihood of greater
transference and countertransference. He was considered a perceptive
and dynamic teacher, but, at the same time, it opened the door to the
possibilities of intimate seductive contact.
Power, as dened by the Law regulates the professional relationship between a man and a woman. Only recently has this heterosexual
bias become supplemented by same-sex relationships that are equally
vigilant in their stance towards the breach of trust in a professional
relationship. The perversity and deviance of the breach, however, is
perceived as being more severe in the latter than the former instance.
Male teachers, after all, often married their high school and college
students who were close to the age of consent to prevent litigation.
Women teachers, in contrast, were to be the moral exemplars by
remaining unmarried, the prohibition lasting well into the 1950s in
some countries. Queer couples, however, have no such loophole to
fall back on. Such a state of aairs is particularly pressing for queer
pedagogy since the carnal body plays such a central role in its theorizations. Accusations of pedophilia and sexual predation are
especially rampart (see Britzman, 1995; Sears, 1999).
Power as dened by the Law in relation to the exchange of
knowledge presents a strict disembodied space so that the carnal
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sexualized body does not hamper reason and rationality. Such a

monastic space is exemplied in the closing scene of Jean-Jacques
Annauds The Name of the Rose (1986). Adson von Melk and his
Master William of Baskerville leave the remote abbey in the Italian
north and ride by the no name girl who had earlier seduced the
young apprentice into fornication, begging him to take her with
him. As Adson hesitates and looks at her, the Master tells him that he
must make up his mind, be caught by the follies of the esh or follow
him in the matters of the mind. Woman, in the medieval vision of the
Great Chain of Being was a dangerous creature who seduced men
away from their spiritual and intellectual pursuits, a long-standing
fear within patriarchal dominant societies. Has much changed?
BETWEEN PHALLIC WOMEN AND NURTURING
GODDESSES: THE SPACE OF CONTRADICTIONS
Within the family romance of schooling, women, in particular, must
struggle with the default position of masculinity. It appears that they
must negotiate a paradox between wielding the phallus by mimicking
masculinity as a masquerade through style, dress, and even instruments
of power (the nuns strap, Archies teacher, Miss Grundy, wielded a
pointer which could act as a cane, as did the teacher in the Calvin and
Hobbes cartoon strip, or as in the more recent case of LouAnne
Johnson, popularized by John Smiths lm, Dangerous Minds (1995),
the ability to display her military ghting prowess if need be. Have these
instruments now been replaced by PowerPoint presentations?). Or, fall
into role of the Good Mother where care and nurturing as values
dominate as advocated in the early writings of Noddings (1984).
Love and emotion are certainly not disallowed in a pedagogical
relationship. Only the specicity of their display must remain nonsexual. One might characterize this allowable form of love as a
Mother Teresa type of caring which juxtaposes the maternal breast
to the paternal chest. Both are familial forms of love: one protective
and distant, the other protective and close; together they reproduce
the family romance. However, the inequality of authority between
male and female teachers emerges rather rapidly in this set-up. Boys
in elementary grades often perceive female teachers who assert their
authority as phallic; which is to say, they are represented as bearded
men in drag, or dragon ladies and vampire queens. Such women
teachers pose a threat to masculinity, especially during the transition
341
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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JAN JAGODZINSKI
success was only mildly achieved, is a way to undo authority and

reestablish male dominance. They do not perceive themselves as
victims as much as triumphant victors.
EROS AND TEACHING: SEXUALITY RUN AMOK?
So what happens when male and female teachers cross the line with
their students; when seduction and unconscious desire overwhelm the
rational mind and the teacher is condemned of committing an
unpardonable sin? Does Eros (love and sexuality) always enter into
the picture when it comes to the transfer of knowledge, and should it
once the distance between teacher and student no longer exists? No less
a radical educator than bell hooks seems comfortable mixing Eros and
pedagogy together. She has written two essays to state her position. Her
rst essay (1994) is a rather weak armation of Eros in comparison to
the second (1996), where she claims it is possible to separate the positive
uses of desire. Student/facultys erotic bonding can enhance self-actualization from relations where professors use sexuality to dominate and
coerce. But is it so simple to keep them apart? Who coerces who in the
relationship? Does not their slippage take place precisely when least
expected, when control is simply lost and life derails?
The case of Sydney Orr presents a teacher who was concerned with
the spiritual and sexual transformation of his students based on an
emotional reading of Plato. Orr had personal contacts with students,
including intimate discussions in his study, giving them lifts home after
late lectures. His lectures were frequently highly erotic in their content,
covering issues of free love and various kinds of sexual desires. It was
said that his charismatic intensity made him a popular choice even
amongst the Student Christian Movement because of his mission of
redeeming the world through love. It seems as if philosophy professors
are particularly prone to transgress, especially ones who question
authority structures. Orr was strongly opposed to centralized communism and to the objectivity of logical positivism. The ctionalized
account of the Life of David Gale, directed and written by Alan Parker
(2003), seems to play out a similar scenario. Gale, also a philosophy
professor, is charged and accused of raping one of his students during a
party, seduced in a washroom while emotionally devastated by a wife
who left him and by his drunken bouts of alcoholism. Later, Gale is
charged with murder for killing a fellow capital punishment abolitionist, Constance Harraway. When the audience is rst introduced to
343
Gale he is lecturing on fantasy and desire in front of his sophomore

class. Lacans graph of desire is prominently displayed on the blackboard. The banter between him and his students is sexually charged.
When a female student, simply called Berlin whom he is later accused
of raping comes on to him after his lecture, repentant for being late to
his class and willing to do anything for a grade, he seductively tortures
her by drawing up close and whispering in her ear, just study.
Ironically, Berlin is expelled as a student before the attendant party so
that, as Constance Harraway puts it in the movie, They had to suspend
her so that Gale could dick her with a clear conscience [otherwise] a
power dierential equals coercion.
The combination of Orrs emotional Platonism and Gales Lacanian inected discourse, which also includes a reference to Socrates
in his drunken stupor, is too much to resist a quirky way into the
question of unconscious desire that informs the slippage between
parentteacher and teacherlover. In Orrs case, the Platonic relationship, which is generally interpreted as devoid of sex, is perverted,
while Gales case evokes Lacans Seminar VIII on Transference
(196061), which spends a considerable amount of time examining
Alcibiades attempt to seduce Socrates by praising his prowess and
knowledge as developed in Platos (1961b) Symposium. Alcibiades
demands a sign from Socrates that he is to be desired in much the
same way that Berlin demands that Gale desire her as well. It is the
countertransference of the response that is crucial to pedagogy.
Desire does not come from having something, but its lack, a
proposition that I discuss later in the paper. For Gale the countertransference was refused, while Orr leaps at the opportunity. Their
respective gestures are consistent with the belief systems they hold:
Gale is interested in the way he can reect back Berlins seduction
upon herself, to make her own up to her fantasy for him, while Orr
has had his ego seduced by Suzanne, believing that his emotionally
ridden Platonic pedagogy was educationally sound.
MISREADING DESIRE: PLEASURE VS. JOUISSANCE
(ENJOYMENT)
Commentaries on this ruined pedagogical relationship have most
often psychologized desire rather than theorizing it as an unconscious
problematic. Australian feminists in particular seemed (at one time at
least) to have become persuaded and inuenced by the direction
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JAN JAGODZINSKI
taken toward Eros and pedagogy by Jane Gallop, a noted Lacanian

psychoanalyst, who, having presented a lecture tour throughout the
country, left a remarkable trail of citational inuences as summarized
in her edited book, Pedagogy: The Question of Impersonation (1995a).
The road towards pedagogical (s)education both in its hetero and
lesbian possibilities has been initiated in the Australian context by
the writings of Erica McWilliam (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 1999,
2000). P. Cryles Geometry of the boudoir is often cited as oering an
exposition of women as pedagogues in ars erotica. Sappho and her
legendary gynaikeion functioned independently of patriarchal
authority in their didactic lesbianism, while the hetairae, the elite
whores of ancient Greece, were renowned for their lovemaking skills
and intellect. Although such a position comes close to repeating a
gynocentrism, McWilliam doesnt commit herself to a hetero or lesbian bias, yet given her confession that she taught in an all boys
school for twelve years, I suspect she is drawing on the heterosexual
seductions toward her by her male students. McWilliams understanding of Eros as desire is decidedly one where the conscious
imaginary plays the major role. However, there is certainly a recognition that pleasure as it relates to desire is what is missing and
under theorized in schools where the de-sexualized body is the rule.
Such an account of pleasure (as desire) is a psychological construct
that diers from a psychoanalytic account of its complex and paradoxical relation to fantasy: the way in which fantasy articulates the
sin of enjoyment, at the same time staging a myth as to its loss. When
enjoyment is evoked with fantasy, this is not the same thing as
pleasure. Enjoyment, as Freud articulated the concept, was beyond
the pleasure principle. It is a destabilizing, traumatic and excessive
force jouissance in Lacans terminology.
Read from a Lacanian perspective, McWilliam makes the categorical mistake between the object of desire and the object-cause of
desire. The two are not the same. One is conscious and rests on an
Imaginary psychic plane of pleasure while the other is unconscious
and evokes enjoyment (jouissance). Put in sexual terms, the person
whom I desire is not the same as the object-cause of desire, which
makes me desire that person. That causal object is more often
unknown to the desiring person it lies on the psychic register of what
Lacan terms the Real, but shapes our attraction to the other. There is
something more in that person than the person him or herself, raising
a particular ethic that surrounds all fantasies. Berlins own failure as a
345
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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JAN JAGODZINSKI
in relation to the Other (like Sartre or Levinas), he makes a bold

move and follows Freuds critique of the biblical injunction to love
your neighbor (Nachbar) as oneself (Freud, 1950/1895). Basically,
ethics is not a question of understanding why the neighbour may be
equally loved or hated, rather it is trying to understand how such
contradictory elements are found at the heart of the self. Ethics, in
this sense, is not to be thought primarily as a relation to the Other,
but more as a nonrelation of the self. The good for Lacan, becomes
situated in the realm of morality where it is linked relationally to the
dialectic and power to deprive the Other of his or her good to assert
what is human. In contrast, the space of the beautiful is linked with
this nonrelation to the self. What is beautiful is the attempt to
understand ones own ignorance ones unconscious desire. Ethics
becomes a confrontation with an inhuman limit the Real that disrupts the symbolic order of what is considered normatively human.
Its relation to the beautiful is associated with violence, blindness,
transgression and Freuds death drive! The beautiful has a certain
destructive quality about it as an ethical act (or event) that serves up a
particular complaint questioning the human symbolic order as it is
structured whereas, the charge of inhumanness comes from the
established Law. There is a spectral presence of death as the person
becomes suspended between two deaths: a physical death as well as
potentially a symbolic one in the sense that he or she is inhuman,
outside the symbolic order and has no place in it. From this emerges
the well-cited kernel of Lacanian (1992) ethics: I propose then that,
from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be
guilty is having given ground relative to ones desire (319). Ethics
takes on a particular form. Whereby acts are neither specied, nor are
they prohibited other than acting in conformity with ones desire or
put another way not giving way on that desire. Desire is pried loose
from its Imaginary moorings. A confrontation with the Real of desire
is to worry the good objects that the subject imagines to be pleasurable, useful and benecial. What is beautiful is to ruin ones own
narcissism.
THE EROTIC PEDAGOGY OF JANE GALLOP:
POST-OEDIPAL REALIZATIONS
The mention of the Lacanian Jane Gallop, now and again throughout
this essay, raises the ethics of the Real in pedagogical encounters that
347
can lead into the bedroom. Pedagogically, this is a most dangerous

game. And there is no better player at it than Jane Gallop who has
caused more disruption, or better still, interruption than most queer
academic theorists (see Talbot, 1994). Throughout her many writings
(1982a, 1982b, 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1997) Gallop goes to the
extreme claim that escapades in bed between student and professor,
being economically non-reproductive, provide a resistant stance to
the capitalist and heterosexist machinery. Flings, one-night stands,
and occasional sex, are after all, not commitments to have children,
or to falling in love. Eros can be neatly divided between love and
having sex. Such relationships do not aect the pedagogical transference but can actually enhance it! Gallop practices what might be
termed perverse s/m transference. The interdiction of the analyst to
fall in love with the analysand is perversely still maintained. For
Gallop (1997, p. 44) having sex and being in love remain divided.
Another way of putting it, Gallop practices a form of s/m ritualized
pedagogy which initiates a irtation, a tease, an amorous, sometimes torturous game of sexual banter that may end up in the bedroom where conceptual sexual ethics can then be negotiated (see
Gallop, 1982b; MacCannell, 1991; Golding, 1993, p.82). Could this
be another variation of Orrs emotional Platonism? But, sometimes
this game goes out of control, as it did with Gallops (1997) harassment case. The twenty-one second staged kiss between Gallop and
Beckelman went awry. It seemed that neither party knew the signal
when to stop as most s/m couples would. It certainly could not be a
word (as in a letter); the long hesitation suggests a contestation of
wills, a possible countertransference of hate by Beckelman.
In Gallops s/m exchange the students written text becomes the
agreed upon contract which requires close scrutiny (deconstructive
reading). The idea is to keep to the letter with the letter-grade being
the nal reward. This is Gallops way of attaining her jouissance. It is
a game of who is smarter in the double sense of its meaning: being
on top, or who smarts the most in terms of being put down but
almost always playfully, of course with the eloquence of repartee
that is only known in English rhetoric departments. The result:
painful satisfactions. Gallops in-your-face style makes some students
feel oppressed, while others cant get enough of her dishing it out.
The student-slave is asked to reverse the normative pederastic missionary position: to stand up for his/herself. Defend. Argue. All for
the sake of higher learning, of course. This would support
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JAN JAGODZINSKI
McWilliams (1997) position who explicitly mentions the decit of the

missionary position in education.
Sex, or fucking as Gallop calls it, should be interpreted more as
a question of the demands of the drive than of desire (although she
uses the term desire mistakenly or intentionally throughout her
provocative book, Feminist accused of sexual harassment). The
drive, in contrast to desire, is a constant intense pleasure, which she
claims her students allegedly experience. It is a circuitous repetition
around the object-cause of desire. It is a demand that is not caught
up by lack since the repetition itself is satisfactory. In other words,
the aim (and not goal as with desire) of the exchange in the bedroom was for Gallop to fuck the teacher out of him. (Gallop,
1997, p.42; Dana Beckelman in Talbot, 1994, p. 34). Taking the
teacher out of the professor ensures for Gallop, a more egalitarian
relationship a leveling of the power game with her on top (see
Gallop, 1997, pp. 4142). The daughter has seduced the Father.
This was the secret of the joke played by her graduate students,
which Gallop could never quite gure out: SBJF (Stop By, Fuck
Jane) (1997, p.100). In this case, sometimes masochistic slave-bottoms are victorious in succeeding to fuck the teacher out of their
hired tops in the theater of educational perversion, experiencing
their own heights of jouissance.
There are many possible names for such a pedagogical relationship
as it is being performed by Gallop, all perverse: teacher as Vamp/
Dominatrix, the student as the slave-bottom who has contracted out
a pact to study with a Distinguished Professor with a reputation of
being a tough grader and harsh critic, that she has been known to
push them through four or ve drafts of a paper, and making some
students cry for not having fullled the assignment and having
outed the rules (Talbot, 1992, p. 28). Also, ... I feel part of my
job as a teacher is to make students feel uncomfortable, to ask
question they dont necessarily want to face (Talbot 1992, p. 35,
italic in the original). Gallops sartorial aunts seamed stockings,
spike heels, red nails, glove-tight Joan Crawford suits, skirts made of
mens ties, bright red power suits deep voice and loud and fast talk
seem to conrm this image. Perhaps only the comparable amboyance of Camille Paglia can compete in this arena. Teacher and student as cannibals devouring each others objet a to taste a little bit(e)
of the Real in reality is perhaps another way of describing such a
relationship (see Deutscher, 1993).
349
The worst interpretation perhaps, and the most extreme would be

the teacher as Predator/Pedophile and the student as prey; applicable
only to a pathological perverted conscious whose fantasies involve a
kind of unending jouissance. Gallop covets such a pedagogy under
power feminism and not queer pedagogy per se. Her own bisexuality
enables her to claim she is playing a dualist role: enacting authority in
place of the father and also being a supportive informal mother who
might be read once more as the bearded lady syndrome of phallic
possession. Is she then, hysterically perverse? Lacanian psychoanalysis wouldnt tolerate such a confusion of symptoms and contradiction of terms. Clearly there was a break in her life. She claimed (in
1997) that since meeting her current male partner and having a child
she no longer sleeps with her students (who, she discloses, were
almost all male in her early career as a graduate student and then as a
beginning professor). But her lesbian and hetero irtations continue,
and she condones the bedroom, although she now herself avoids it.
So why are such structures that have been discussed thus far detrimental for pedagogy?
THE CASE OF SOCRATES: WHAT IS PEDAGOGICAL
DESIRE?
To answer this requires again a turn to Lacan, especially Seminar
VIII, The Transference, the seminar that followed his ruminations on
ethics. In the Lacanian psychoanalytic transference the students love
for the teacher is initiated when s/he perceives in the teacher something that s/he doesnt have: namely, the objet a, what Lacan identied as the agalma in Seminar VIII (see also Salecl, 1996). The root
of agalma in the Greek, Lacan tells us in his tenth session (Wed. 1,
Feb. 1961), comes from agallo, to adorn, to ornament. It refers to a
precious object, a jewel, something which is inside. Agalma is
Golems ring, his precious, but not the ring as the object of his
desire, but what the ring can do its cause. Its possession makes him
feel complete, like a National Rie Association (NAR) advocate
wearing his gun. Agalma makes, so to speak, an object extraordinary, whose aesthetics can then charm and grasp the soul the seat
of unconscious desire. In Platos (1961b) Symposium, Alcibiades
practices a variation of emotional Platonism as he tries to score on
Socrates by telling him how captivated he is by his teaching despite
his ugly physical appearance. But Socrates, who in the past has made
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JAN JAGODZINSKI
it known that he loves only two things Alcibiades and wisdom

rebus his advances and rebukes him in front of his friends at Agathons party. Why? The teacher is an authority gure who, in Lacans
sense, is someone who is supposed-to-know. (As Gallop mentions,
students come to her, she doesnt go to them, the fantasy of apparent
altruism. She confesses that she never refuses any student who asks to
work with her). The loving student falls in love by presupposing that
this object-cause is in the teacher more than in him/herself. Socrates
young lovers are not attracted to his physical appearance being
physically ugly or beautiful is not the issue but to his relationship to
truth. As Foucault put it, Beyond the appearance of the object, love
is a relation to truth (1985, p.239).
The proper response of the teacher under Lacanian suppositions is
to insist there is nothing in him or herself that is worthy of such love,
which is precisely Socrates stance. What the student falls in love with is
the way that the teacher enjoys. The way the teacher gets o her/his
jouissance; the way s/he pursues the question of truth, which is ultimately a fallible exercise because we are all ignorant. Jouissance
comes through the teachers bodily comportment and voice through
the performative teaching self. Socrates says as much, I never set
myself up as any mans (sic.) teacher, but if anyone, young or old, is
eager to hear me conversing and carrying out my private mission, I
never grudge him the opportunity.... (Platos (1961a) Apology, 33a).
It is this eroticism which must be displaced elsewhere, namely to the
love of the subject (the disciple), to literature, to art, to the love of
teaching itself, to the search for wisdom but never to the bedroom.1 In
brief, the eroticism must be channeled towards the students own
desire: his or her own objet a, the cause of truth knowledge as savoir
rather than connaissance (on this distinction see jagodzinski, 2002).
Only this way can there be a mutual undertaking in an unequal
relationship.
Socrates is playing the Master here, someone who is in control of
himself and in a position to teach self-mastery to his beloved student.
The pursuit of truth is what he lacks rather than what his student
lacks, i.e., the students desire. This suggests a rather sharp distinction
between the aims of School and the Academy, which occurs only if
1
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).
351
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/
353
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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JAN JAGODZINSKI
screwed them she felt on top powerful, aggressive. Not unlike

Berlin when she seduces David Gale. If you cant outsmart them
screw them. In this perverted way the dream of Sadean feminist
egalitarianism emerges precisely when the student/teacher relationship breaks down. Gallop always goes back to the moments of
jouissance she experienced during the early days of feminist liberation
where, often for the rst time, lesbian relationships between student
and teacher were outed. It is no surprise, therefore, why she works so
hard to rewrite the Academys sexual harassment code, which
underwrites the Fathers Law of protecting students from incestuous
relationships.3 She wants to take the place of the father. As she
writes, My desire to be an academic, intellectual speaker is a desire
to speak from the fathers place. ... I want to expose the fathers desire
so that I could take his place, but as a sexed subject (in Talbot, 1992,
p. 25). She wants to be the objet a for her students in what has to be
described as passive narcissistic desire where one desires to be the
object of the Others love, admiration, idealization and recognition.
She says she is driven by desire to please the students (1995a, p. 3);
I always try to get us [students] to the place where learning begins to
dance. When we get there, my students love me and I am crazy for
them (in Talbot, 1992, p. 20). The [lesbian] couple adopted me as
their pet teacher, and as I thoroughly admired them, I was tickled to
be so chosen, and My desire gave me drive and energy; being an
object of desire made me feel admired and wanted, worthy and lovable (Gallop, 1997, p. 48 and 50 respectively).
But, nowhere, for instance, does Gallop acknowledge (publicly at
least) that the countertransference of hate (rather than love) is often
equally a part of such transferences. Unlike the Lacanian teacheranalyst who has nothing to give except the students (analysands)
own objet a so that s/he may confront the truth of his/her desire,
Gallop has something to give: her knowledge as Jane Gallop. The
pervert knows exactly what s/he wants, and how to get o on s/her
jouissance. Gallop is not empty but full of herself. There are students who want, in some way, to be intellectuals or academics like I
am. And these are the students I most care about as a teacher, and
The pleasure I get from working with graduate students, the
intensity of my wish that certain promising graduate students will
3
Her rhetorical skills are brilliantly in full display in The lecherous professor: A
reading (1995b). Ebert (1996, 801) attempts to deconstruct Gallops rhetorical parlance.
355
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
356
JAN JAGODZINSKI
point of an intense anxiety before the student explosively expresses

her/his will in the form of a command stop. But it didnt stop with
Dana Beckelman during the kiss. It only stopped when it became a
harassment charge. More telling of this game are the statements of her
graduate student Chris Amirault: But Jane makes you feel like your
own position needs to be investigated. There has to be engagement,
aect, discomfort sometimes. If those things arent there, theres no
learning (Talbot, 1994, p. 27). These are the telltale signs of the drives
where jouissance dwells and the student gets his kicks, guratively
and literally.
Hence, the masochist teacher devotes her/himself to pleasuring
the Other (through irtation, sexual banter, seduction) to a point
where the student can no longer take it. Jouissance becomes
unbearable and the student nally imposes limits on it (enough
rewrites!). Thus the perverted teacher makes her/himself into the
instrument of the Others jouissance, and in this way s/he manages to
get her/himself commanded, i.e., the perverts own desire makes the
partner, as Other, lay down the Law. The pretense is that it is the
student (as Other) who the masochist pervert uses for his/her own
desire to push a father substitute to legislate and exact punishment.
The masochistic pervert pretends that the Other is the one who is
laying down the Law, when s/he is the one who is pulling the strings.
In this way the Law-of-the-Father is perpetually challenged. The
masochistic perverted teachers own desire takes the place of the
Others desire as Law, staging or enacting it, as it were, and propping
it up (and this is the specicity of the disavowal at work). The masochistic perverted teacher isnt in search for pain per se, pain being
already a sign that the student has agreed to impose a condition, limit,
toll, or penance on the teacher. The teacher then backs o having
pushed the student to his/her limit so that s/he now smarts. But the
appearance of punishment becomes a form of relief to the masochistic
pervert. S/he has done her teaching job and fullled the contract (the
lettered text between teacher/student). Proof has been established that
there really is someone extracting a pound of esh who demands a
sacrice of him/herself to the Symbolic Order.
IS THERE A BUT...?
To close this essay, I have made a strong stance regarding the ethics
of teachers/professors sleeping with students, claiming that this is a
357
perverted structure in relation to the Oedipal romance of schooling.

The practice has a long history, especially in English and Fine Arts
departments where issues of eroticism are always in the foreground in
the material covered. But, and in what is to follow this will be a very
signicant but, there is another way of deconstructing this crucial
issue. Perversion is almost always colloquially understood as being
morally evil. But, perversion is a historically changing category. As
an obvious example, homosexuality was nally removed from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric
Association in 1973. As Freud observed we are born as polymorphous perverse creatures. Perversion for Freud (1905) was not considered an illness. In his late writings he claimed that the whole body
was an erogenous zone (Freud, 1940, p.146). Perversion becomes
normal, and therefore pejorative connotations of its use become
obsolete. In Queer Theory it becomes a moralizing anachronism that
is taken up ironically and played with. We now live in a post-Oedipal
and postmodern culture, at least in North America and Europe,
where there is an active pushing back of the list of illegal sex crimes in
dierence to many parts of the world where religious dominations
strongly abominate same-sex relations, masturbation, and various
forms of adultery and sexual positions some to the point of execution. In states like Florida, Michigan, Virginia and Texas oralgenital contact is still illegal! Fellatio until 1992 was illegal in the
District of Columbia. Such laws target gays and lesbians, and are
rarely used against male-female couples. The recent American election between Kerry and Bush exemplies how divided the United
States is concerning these issues. However, the ordination Dr. Jerey
John and Canon Gene Robinson as the rst gay bishops in Anglican
an Episcopalian dioceses is a case in point of increased tolerance in
some sectors of society. In the United States, people now spend more
on the porn industry every year than they do on movie tickets, home
videos and all the performing arts combined. Deviant sex is on the
rise. But it is not perversion and morality, but an ethics of the Real
that of jouissance which should be our guide in pedagogical relationships: what are the consequences of the act to the lives of the
people involved in terms of coming to terms with their own symptoms of unconscious desire? At what point does the perverse become
a death drive for change, andat what point does the act fall into
harming the other through pain, humiliation, degradation and so on?
Many people mentioned in Gallops book wrote about being hurt by
358
JAN JAGODZINSKI
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
359
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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Department of Secondary Education

University of Alberta
341 Education South,
Edmonton,
Alberta, T6A 2G5,
Canada
E-mail: jan.jagodzinski@ualberta.ca
EROS AND EDUCATION:

THE ROLE OF DESIRE IN
TEACHING AND LEARNING
by Kathleen Hull
n this article, I would like to discuss Platos

doctrine of eros, and how it might relate to
pedagogy. For us, today, the primary and
predominant meaning of the term eros is sexual passion. But for the Greeks, eros was more complex. Plato uses
the term eros to mean desire in general, connected to but distinct
from both human sexuality and rationality. In the Symposium,
Platos famous dialogue on the nature of love, he views eros as connected not only to sexual love, but also with philosophizing and
to our desires for beauty, wisdom, and even immortality.
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.
THE NEA HIGHER EDUCATION JOURNAL | 19
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
She worked hard to

impress me with her
intelligence, the best
gift she could offer and
I could accept in a
learning setting.
20 | Thought & Action FALL 2002
over the course of their teaching careers.

When a student came into the first professors office and told him that
she was in love with him, he said, Your feelings are not real and I do
not reciprocate your feelings. The second professor took the same
approach, adding, Perhaps you should go see the school psychologist.
In the olden days, some professors might have simply taken the girls
to bed. It seems to me that all these responses to desire leave something
to be, well, desired. The question is, how does one respond responsibly
to the eruption of eros in the academy? The types of responses outlined
hereeither rejecting the students feelings or having a romantic relationship with the studentdisplay a lack of imagination and, I think, an
inability to appreciate the possible significance of the students passionate feelings to her intellectual growth.
hile I respect the caution, concern, and moral uprightness of my
two colleagues, I cannot resist the idea that they may have dismissed a potentially rich educational experiencefor both teacher and
student. Desire, confused and inchoate, was silenced. Today, there seems
to be so much anxiety produced by these situations that reason is often
used defensively by teachers to shut down further conversation. Many
teachers feel they would jeopardize their careers if they didnt shut down
these students feelings right away. After all, a students expression of love
for a teacher seems bound to end in a bad way; so it would seem that the
responsible teacher does well to cut off the feelings immediately and
move on.
I dont disagree, ultimately, with my colleagues actions in these particular cases. But I would like to explore whether there might not be
another way of responsibly thinking about and moving through erotic

moments in the teaching relationship. These moments can fuel that rare
and life-giving passion within the student which, if properly channeled,
leads to the desire for knowledge and the love of learning. It seems to me
that cultivating students desires and loves is central to our task as teachers, involving the forming and shaping of their affects, appetites, and
longings.
On a basic level, we need to recognize that traditional classroom education is a physical activity: All of the learning and discussion and
exchange of ideas is carried out by
embodied beings. Were not brains in a
vat, nor is the classroom a rarified,
purely contemplative, disembodied
world. Our passions and yearnings and
longings, even in the realm of ideas,
involve our bodies. Human desire is
not just physical or mental, but both.
When we say, She desires justice with
a passion, we mean to suggest that her
deep love of justice is not just intellectual, but involves her whole being. The
passion for justice has an erotic component, insofar as it includes sensual, physical, emotional, and psychic
expression of what is most deeply felt and believed by the lover of justice.
But how did this young womanfor she is likely to be youngcome to
want justice with a passion? Could it have occurred through reading
books about human suffering or through some kind of introspection?
Could it have happened through her having passively sat through academic lectures? Could one desire justice as a result of listening to a sermon in church? All these are logical possibilities. But I think it is more
likely that she had a partner or partners in her development of the idea
of justice and her connection to it; someone with whom she deeply
shared the joy, anger, frustration, and occasional clarity that accompany
the project of understanding what justice is all about.
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.
ducation at its best includes an erotic component in the teaching and

learning process. Yet, to speak of erotic dimensions of teaching, especially in todays social and political environment, quickly leads to concerns about the sexual, emotional, or psychological use of the student by
the teacher and about the disparity of power between them.
As James Hillman notes in The Souls Code, its unfortunate that the
erotic component of education is seen only with the genital eye as
abuse, seduction, harassment, or impersonal hormonal need.1 By gen-
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
For Dewey, experience is

understood in active
termsdoing things that
change ones objective
environment and/or
ones internal conditions.
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.
he inquiry I make here begins with my observation that too many

students are dead in the water, bored, and lacking any real motivation
to read, to study, to acquire knowledge. There is widespread intellectual
apathy and cynicism. These are signs of the sleep of desire. For several
years I focused on developing students capacity for careful reasoning.
The sleep of reason produces monsters,3 I believed. As a philosophy
instructor, I tried to get students to be better reasoners. But did I awaken
their reason? I recalled what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal
(20 April 1834):
This inquiry begins

with my observation
that too many students
are dead in the water,
bored, and lacking any
real motivation to
learn.
The whole secret of the teachers

force lies in the conviction that men
are convertible. And they are. They
want awakening. Get the soul out of
bed, out of her deep habitual
sleep4
How can we, as teachers, do this?

How can we foster desire, yearning,
love for knowledge, and clear thinking in students? Perhaps the problem with students internal condition is not only or even primarily cognitivethe lack of love of learning
is not a function of false beliefs or intellectual incapacity or faulty reasoning. Rather, student apathy may be due to a kind of hopelessness:
Most students lack the experience of the power of a sustained passion
directed toward a general, non-particular end or good.
The teaching problem is not one of developing students reasoning
powersnor is it really a problem of formulating what Plato or Aristotle
would call proper ends. Rather, the teachers problem is to help awaken desire at its deepest level. The solution involves developing students
capacity for openness and receptivity to their own and to one anothers
hearts, minds, and passions. We learn from Plato that thought without
eros is empty; and eros, if directed only toward the sensual,
without thought, is blind.5 What we need is a model of teaching that
involves a full, thoughtful eros directed toward ends that move beyond the
sensual.
Rather than gearing our teaching toward passing on to students some
static bits of knowledge, Id like to suggest a teaching model in which the
object is to nurture the construction of a desiring self, a seeker of goals
and goods and ends.
Certainly there are profound differences among various peoples
objects of desire. Being aware of those differences can point students to
the need to construct a self, to make a personal commitment to particu-
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
Perhaps the possibility

for responsible
construction of the self
begins with the
experience of ones
impossible passions.
his is a good question to ask

ourselves, as teachers, if we decide to recognize eros in the classroom:
Are we complicated monsters swollen with passion? Or gentle, simple
persons who have a destiny both divine and lowly? Or something altogether different?
In 1978, Audre Lorde gave a speech at Mount Holyoke College entitled
Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In that speech, Lorde suggested that
the erotic arises from the deepest dimensions of our sense of self. It may be
described as the inchoate desire that emerges from the chaos of our
strongest, inarticulate feelings. She describes the erotic as a kind of energy
that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all [our] experiences.
Dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem or examining an idea,
can all be erotically satisfying experiences, according to Lorde. These
activities open our deepest feelings and lead to new feelings of joy. For my
purposes here, her best description of the erotic is as the nurturer or
nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge. It is a passion, a deep form of
love that, when shared between persons working on a common pursuit,
forms a bridge of understanding between them.
But, Lorde notes, we live in an anti-erotic culture that fears and misnames the real power of the erotic in our lives. The erotic has been trivialized and made into plasticized sensation. American society, in particular, has confused the erotic with its opposite, the pornographic.
Pornography and eroticism are two diametrically opposed uses of the
sexual; pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for

it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes
sensation without feeling.7
n contrast, a more mysterious path to exploring the erotic winds its
way through the ancient Greeks. As noted above, eros is the Greek
term for passion, love, and desire. Eros is also the god of love in Greek
mythology. Seen as an age-old powerful force, Eros is undependable,
violent, lethal, and irrational. It cannot be explained; its appearance is
mysterious and arbitrary. And yet,
according to Greek mythology, it
was indispensable to the formation
of the world. It was present at the
very beginning and even functioned
as a kind of catalyst for creation. Eros
is a personification of the life force
that engenders change and growth.
On the positive side, the erotic, for
the Greeks, involves energy, suddenness, intensity, and beauty. The
Greeks were fully aware of the
threat posed by erotic desire to the
human will, to morality, and to a life of virtue. And yet, they also recognized that eros has great value.
Eros as desire may be understood as the internal movement of the
body, mind, or spirit toward having and enjoying an object that is seen as
good by the one who desires. There is physical desire, of course, including, the appetites for food, drink, sleep, and sex. And there is what we
might call spiritual desire, when the object loved is of the spiritual or
intellectual order: for example, wisdom, justice, beauty, ideals, truth, science, art, and the good. Postmodern thinkers might suggest that these
objects (justice, beauty, truth, and the good) dont exist; but few would
deny the human drive toward such conceptual objects. On the Greek
model, eros offers a mixed bag of positive and negative values.
Plato viewed the Eros of Greek mythology as just a parable.8 Yet, as
Jaspers points out, Platos own thinkingindeed, his whole project in
philosophyhad its source in his love of his teacher, Socrates. Platos eros
was real. Illuminated by the reality of his concrete experience, his love for
Socrates was eventually transformed into a love of wisdom. Thus, Jaspers
suggests, for Plato, thinkinggood, hard, philosophical thinking
becomes an upward-tending enthusiasm.9 In other words, both desire for
wisdom and the intellectual means to it emerge through eros. And it is the
Socrates of Platos Symposium, I believe, who offers us an erotic model of
education.
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:
The average student

seems coolly
indifferent, even
cynical toward the idea
of learning.
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
Socrates learns that what causes love and desire is recognition of a

need or lack. Love is the love of something. As Socrates says, a thing that
desires, desires something of which it is in need; otherwise, if it were not
in need, it would not desire it (200B). The tall person doesnt desire to
be tall because he already has that trait. The strong person doesnt desire
strength for the same reason.
In the case of the teacher-student relationship, the students awareness
of her lack of knowledge is very likely to be aroused by her presumption
that the teacher has knowledge. The recognition of a lack of knowledge

gives rise to love and desire. However, precisely what the lack or need is,
and what object will satisfy that lack is not clear at first. Indeed, the waters
may be murky! The passion for knowledge is often mistaken for its presumed object.
he student may come to love or even fall in love with the teacher. But
what the student really longs for and needs to possess is knowledge
not to possess or be possessed by the teacher. The best teachers recognize
that we do our students the best service not by cultivating their fantasy of
us as all-knowing, but by acknowledging our ultimate ignorance and
turning them back upon themselves, upon their own lack. We can never
satisfy their lack, nor can they satisfy ours; to an important extent, we
must all fill ourselves.
Undergraduates are transformed into lovers of knowledge when their
spirits are made restless, when they begin to experience the longing for
something more. But then where are students left? With an acquisitive,
unsatisfied desire? To love knowledge is to desire knowledge. And yet we
all knowas Faust knewthat the desire for knowledge can be limitless.
Plato certainly recognized the unlimited nature of desire. His answer is
that through the proper education we can arrive at the true eros whose
proper object is absolute and eternal good.
Yet, the Socrates of Platos dialogues is always wary about offering a
final definition of the good. It is essentially indefinable. The good is what
one loves and desires but does not fully know. Whats important is to recognize that desire has to be rightly placed in relation to some good.
Students ought to be challenged to find their own intellectual, moral, or

spiritual frameworkto locate themselves in relation to a good they
identify for themselves. As Charles Taylor notes, these goods are the ones
by which we will measure our lives.11
Examples of goods by which we may measure the worth of our lives
include: rational mastery, children, relationships, helping others, fame,
expressive fulfillment, justice, God, wealth, or even two cars and a house
with a white picket fence. The student who has awakened from the sleep
of desire and who is properly directed by teachers will recognize that he
or she must choose one or more of
these goods or ends. The confused
desire with which the student may
have startedfor the particular
teacheris no longer a desire for
possession but a desire of the student to produce or, in Platos words,
to bring forth in beauty. The final
fruit of this desire, then, is creativity.
Ultimately, that is what I want for my studentsthat they choose their
goals and goods and approach them creatively. What needs to be cultivated in students is a healthy recognition of their deficiency.
In Symposium, Alcibiades complains, [Socrates] presents himself as
your lover and before you know it, youre in love with him yourself. But
Socrates never sleeps with Alcibiades because that would betray all of
Diotimas teachings about education. Erotic desire is cherished as being
higher than release or calm.
But the recognition of ones lack or need produces an uncomfortable
feeling. Socrates makes me feel that my lifemy lifeis no better than
the most miserable slaves, says Alcibiades. Like Alcibiades, we are all
captive, more or less, to the unexamined drives of our culture for material gain and power. What can wake us up to the fact of our captivity? What
can free us to explore wider and deeper ends? Plato suggests that love
between teachers and students can be the catalyst for our awakening and
intellectual growth.
Plato knows the power of the erotic, and Diotima teaches that education ought to be both in league with it and in conflict with it. Education
is in league with eros when it turns both students and teachers back to the
source of all eros, which is found within the person. Education is in conflict with eros when the erotic degrades our nobility and obscures the
search for knowledge. As teachers, we ought to strive to stir our students
deepest desires and to build on the material of their unsatisfied longings.
In the most general terms, those longings may be called erotic and may
sometimes spill over into the sexual. Our awareness of this process allows
What needs to be
cultivated in students
is a healthy recognition
of their deficiency.
us to channel these wonderful energies in healthy, morally responsible

ways.
o what do we say to the student who dares to express his or her love
for us? Very simply, I am honored that you have such feelings for me.
It sure takes a lot of courage to share those feelings. You are an admirable
young woman/man. We have a special relationship that is all about learning, though, so lets direct ourselves back to the work at hand. What did
you think of last nights reading assignment? We honor these eruptions
of feeling by acknowledging them, and moving onnot by denying and
rejecting them.
As a culture, we have largely forgotten the nobler dimensions of the
erotic recognized by the ancient Greeks. One of the glories of being
human is that our thought and imagination create various shades of
objects to fulfill our desires. We have forgotten the ancient notion that
erotic desire, eros, may put one on the road to disruption, change, growth,
and according to some, transcendence.
ENDNOTES
1 James
Hillman, 1997, 121.
2 Hillman,
1997, 117.
3 El
sueno do la razon produce monstruos. Franciso Jose de Goya y Lucientes, Los

Caprishos, 1799.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1957, 16.
Karl Jaspers, 1957, 45.
Plato, 1928, 266-67.
Audre Lorde, 1984, 53-59.
Jaspers, 1957, 44.
Jaspers, 1957, 45.
10
Plato, 1989, 54 (207A207C).
11
See Charles Taylor, 1989, ch. 1 and 2.
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.
bell hooks. Eros, eroticism and the pedagogical process.

Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms.
Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us
have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind.
Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is
present, and not the body. To call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of
repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professorial elders,
who have been usually white and male.

But our nonwhite elders were just as eager to deny the body. The predominantly black college has always been a bastion of repression. The public world of
institutional learning was a site where the body had to be erased, go unnoticed.
When I first became a teacher and needed to use the restroom in the middle of
class, I had no clue as to what my elders did in such situations. No one talked
about the body in relation to teaching. What did one do with the body in the classroom?

Trying to remember the bodies of my professors, I find myself unable to recall them. I hear voices, remember fragmented details, but very few whole bodies.
Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more
fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom. Repression and denial make
it possible for us to forget and then desperately seek to recover ourselves, our feelings, our passions in some private place-after class.

I remember reading an article in Psychology Today years ago when I was still
an undergraduate, reporting a study which revealed that every so many seconds
while giving lectures many male professors were thinking about sexuality -were
even having lustful thoughts about students. I was amazed. After reading this
article, which as I recall was shared and talked about endlessly in the dormitory,
I watched male professors differently, trying to connect the fantasies I imagined
them having in their minds with lectures, with their bodies that I had so faithfully
learned to pretend I did not see. During my first semester of college teaching,
there was a male student in my class whom I always seemed to see and not see at
the same time. At one point in the middle of the semester, I received a call from a
school therapist who wanted to speak with me about the way I treated this student
in the class. The therapist told me that the students had said I was unusually gruff,
rude, and downright mean when I related to him. I did not know exactly who the
student was, could not put a face or body with his name, but later when he identified himself in class, I realized that I was erotically drawn to this student. And
that my naive way of coping with feelings in the classroom that I had been taught
never to have was to deflect (hence my harsh treatment of him), repress, and deny.
Overly conscious then about ways such repression and denial could lead to the
wounding of students, I was determined to face whatever passions were aroused
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.

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Grupo de Estudos Feminismo e a produo do espao

Reunio do dia 18/06/16

Autoridade e seduo na relao pedaggica1

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

e o insucesso do trabalho educativo tende a ser atribudo a supostos transtornos

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

interseces entre as teorias de Marx e de Freud. bem sabido que o Ensino

de sentido histrico e social. Mas, o docente responsabilizado por suas aes

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

Quando a seduo se sobrepe ao trabalho intelectual, duas operaes

qual inexistia a relao objetal. Dito de outro modo, na identificao primitiva a

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

Porm, nem toda severidade, rigidez e conservadorismo do superego infantil

inconsciente. As identificaes que o diferenciam e estruturam deixam no

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

a ela se sobrepem ou quando a substituem parcialmente, as relaes atuais arcam

srie de pulses parciais que buscam satisfao independentemente umas das

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

A ambivalncia emocional que remonta ao clmax do conflito edipiano

ego, ameaado por presses antagnicas precariamente conciliadas: exigncias

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

Concomitantemente, o recalque produz a intensificao regressiva dos afetos

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

tempo, atende s prprias fixaes infantis e s do aluno, seduzindo-o a realizar

conceitualmente, em termos psicanalticos, para mostrar como o processo em que se

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

Lasch, C. (1983 [1979]). A cultura do narcisismo: a vida americana numa era de

Maria Aparecida Morgado

Psic. da Ed., So Paulo, 32, 1 sem. de 2011, pp. 113-130

Studies in Philosophy and Education (2006) 25:335362

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL? SEX

When it comes to sex scandals, does diabolical evil exist in our

THE FAMILY ROMANCE: POST-OEDIPAL

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

the discourses of power and seduction interpellate subject positions

sex-scandals are more predominant in postmodernity is that the age

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

no less a governing authority than the Supreme Court, and on a

sexualized body does not hamper reason and rationality. Such a

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

success was only mildly achieved, is a way to undo authority and

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

Gale he is lecturing on fantasy and desire in front of his sophomore

taken toward Eros and pedagogy by Jane Gallop, a noted Lacanian

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

in relation to the Other (like Sartre or Levinas), he makes a bold

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

can lead into the bedroom. Pedagogically, this is a most dangerous

McWilliams (1997) position who explicitly mentions the decit of the

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

The worst interpretation perhaps, and the most extreme would be

it known that he loves only two things Alcibiades and wisdom

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

screwed them she felt on top powerful, aggressive. Not unlike

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

point of an intense anxiety before the student explosively expresses

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

perverted structure in relation to the Oedipal romance of schooling.

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

Cummings, K. (1991). Principled pleasures: Obsessional pedagogies or (ac)counting

IS THERE AN ETHICS OF DIABOLICAL EVIL?

Higgins, C. (1998). Transference love from the couch to the classroom: A