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Readings for Education
In the last few days, two works came into my hands, unintentionally, that talk about the eroticization of teaching and knowledge. One is the book Class Time by the psychoanalyst and teacher Massimo Recalcati, published in Spanish by Anagrama, and the other is an interview with Michel Foucault, the date of which I have not been able to determine but which can be seen on YouTube. The natural association of the term “eroticism” with sexuality should be clarified: In both works, Recalcati and Foucault allude to Eros, referring simply to the ardent desire that the possibility of learning something awakens in us. For Recalcati, a whole pedagogy emerges from this awakening because the teacher can be the perfect interlocutor for the student to experience learning with desire and pleasure. On the other hand, Foucault thinks that society has taken it upon itself to make teaching and learning a couple of sad, unpleasant activities devoid of vitality to suit a social system order that, in reality, must prevent the enjoyment of knowledge from being for everyone. “Imagine,” he says to his interviewer, “if people have a frenzy for knowledge as they have for sex! Can you imagine the number of people who would crowd the school entrances? It would be a total social disaster.”
I find it amusing to imagine such a society, with people eager to enter schools, or at least libraries, as if they enjoy attending all kinds of clubs. Fantasizing about it makes it more apparent to me why, as Foucault says, the world prevents people from sublimating their sexual impulse through the enjoyment of knowledge and prefers to preserve it only for a few, promoting the idea that learning is boring, tedious, and much more thematic than erotic. The whole strategy would be to foster alienated sexuality, only partially satisfying, and simultaneously take away all that is pleasant about knowledge and teaching, reducing these to the gray spectrum of our interests and our moods.
One societal tactic to discredit knowledge has been to generate much useless knowledge, which, confused with actual knowledge (that is, that which is helpful for something), generates this enormous discouragement. We must admit that we are aware of the feeling that a good portion of what we call “knowledge” is something utterly distant from our interest, and, to a large extent, this makes it heavy and difficult. “Why do I need to learn this?” we ask ourselves repeatedly. Surely, our teachers ask themselves the same thing.
The idea that knowledge arises from a disinterested curiosity independent of needs is naïve. Let us think, for example, about primitive women and men and the specifically human conditions under which they searched for food. For our species, eating requires acquiring or generating knowledge. Surely, what I am about to say is pure coincidence: It is amusing to find associations between the phrases “know something” and “taste something”, between “test a food” and “test a hypothesis” or “conduct tests for research.” (Note: in Spanish, these associations appear closer: “saber algo” vs. “saber a algo;” “probar alimento” vs. “probar una hipotesis,” and “hacer pruebas para una investigación.”) All this I base on the assertion that I once heard from a connoisseur, in the sense of how the first humans threw themselves into the adventure of expanding their diet to find new ways to survive in a changing and hostile world, how guided in part by observing what other animals ate, they sampled things in which they frequently risked their health or lives (I imagine that this exploration soon spread to companion animals, turning dogs, for example, into human’s best friends, partly due to experimenting with them to test the safety or lethality of new foods).
The problem with knowledge begins when the human being moves away from the practical and experiential, enters into the paradox of numerous truths, and takes on the task of attaining the one truth, the final truth, the actual truth, the knowledge of the whole. In that strange moment, which goes back to a mythical time, knowledge ceases to satisfy needs and functions more to face challenges (“to know what comprises the present,” Foucault would say). At this point, knowledge becomes ambition and envy (as in the biblical narrative of Genesis) due to humankind’s eagerness to know the great Truth once and for all, to eat the world, to consume it in one bite. The human being, learning previously from nature, now includes it in his way of life, mutually caring for it with nature, and enters the dynamics of power by surrendering to the temptation (as María Zambrano says) of “wanting to know everything as if he had created it himself.” The eroticism that linked his words with the environment disappears and gives way to a language that separates and divides, ponders, and judges. Certainly, words still hold memories of those primitive love ties, but now language and knowledge serve more to rival other truths. In this way, ideologies are articulated that are entirely alien to the message of experience, leaving us subject to volatile thinking, sustained only in deceptive language games that, for example, separate good from evil, virtues from defects, without helping us to distinguish these in practice.
Recalcati refers to this type of knowledge as a dead, false knowledge, separated from the eroticism of truth, and reminds us that those teachers whom “we have not forgotten and whose names, faces, timbre of voice we remember perfectly, with whom we have a relationship of debt and gratitude, are the ones who taught us above all that one cannot know without the love for knowledge.” Thus, his book Class Time is a remarkable text, to which I only want to add that this love for knowledge, the desirous and contagious way of teaching described there, which contains ingredients like charisma, novelty, and strength, is only possible if it includes three other essential elements: a specific melancholy that orients us towards the experiential origins of knowledge, humility to avoid the mistake of a new loss, and gratitude for the continuous opportunity of reunion.
This is how the eroticism of knowledge and its teaching/learning processes also include a mystical nostalgia, a silent, even painful eroticism, which, when presented crudely, can cause, at first, more rejection than contagion. It is the knowledge that is sometimes sheltered in fearful and shy teachers, such as those whom we did not value at the time and whom, in our childishness, we ridiculed and mocked; people without that “style” of memorable teachers that Recalcati ponders, and yet they never gave up transmitting to us, even if it was vaguely, certain profound knowledge. That is why we also remember them, but they are not the ones for whom we have the least gratitude (that is reserved much more for those who even came to use violence to impose on us a stereotyped, conventional, loveless knowledge, which, over the years, we only clumsily babble, never successfully).
For human beings, learning, whether to consume (“eat”) or elevate their spirits, bestows beautiful rewards but also significant risks. It is best to walk the path hand in hand with loving teachers.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
