The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS OF AVITAL RONELL

PART III Psyche-Soma: The Finite Body

Part Three Psyche–Soma The Finite Body verso 158 Q. In your essay “The Sujet Suppositaire,” you suggest that “a question regarding the transmission of sexual marks as a condition of knowledge can be posed under the name ‘Oedipedagogy.’” Rumor has it that you have also taught a graduate seminar called Oedipedagogy. Would you unpack that term for us and tell us a bit about the seminar? A. What I mean by “Oedipedagogy,” briefly, is the way pedagogy is linked to desire but also to the structures of parricidal writing or overcoming your teachers. This intentional dimension abides in the teaching relation where all sorts of aberrant transferential or countertransferential structures can be observed. At the same time, you never entirely overcome the teachers that you are killing. This situation is something I try to read with and against the grain of something like the anxiety of influence, upping the amps on parricidal engagement or on such tropes as jealousy and appropriative rage. In the introduction to Stupidity, I speak of graduate students packing heat. When you publish something, you’re putting yourself before this tribunal that is going to judge and evaluate what you’ve done. And there were so many graduate students, especially at Berkeley, who were intensely competitive and jealous of one another or of me. Some were loving and wonderful; but, obviously, the site of learning and teaching is a highly charged atmosphere , and I wanted to bring to the fore the impossibility of teaching while I was teaching and also to scan the virginal space of the student body that lets itself be recto 159 filled by the professorial phallus. Of course, these were quite controversial ways of considering our profession, but they’re also canonical discursive formations around the fact of learning that I don’t want to exclude. In the seminar, I wanted to explore the more phantasmatic dimensions of acts of teaching, beginning with Socrates and his affairs of the heart and the phallus. We read Lacan on transference, Derrida’s Carte Postale, and Frankenstein, which is an allegory of teaching and learning, self-education, and the relationship of the master to the creator. (At one point the monster says, “You may be my creator, but I am your master.”) We also read Blanchot on the difference between a teacher and a master teacher, which is very compelling. In the Rat Man, especially, the parameters of the relationship between the analyst and the analysand were very interesting to explore. And with all the difficulty and disjunction of translation, I wanted to see what could be retained of that relationship in the scene of teaching: What are the differences among Lacan as analyst, as teacher, as writer? What’s the relationship between Plato and Socrates, as analyzed by Derrida in Carte Postale? What’s the relation between the mentor and student— between Heidegger and Arendt, Goethe and Eckermann, Batman and Robin? We also looked at the new laws legislating against sexual combinations in the classroom or in the university. When they first were proposed, Foucault, who was at the time at Berkeley, said it was absurd to try to legislate desire out of the scene of teaching . But what interested me especially was the hidden phantasm of sodomy as the groundless ground of the verso 160 transmission of knowledge, and how its ghostly echoes still sit in on sem(e/i)nars—the etymological roots of seminar, seminal works, and other offshoots of the seed of knowledge. . . . . Q. Pedagogy-pedarasty? A. Voilà. The relationship reversed, or arse upwards, so to speak. Plato and Socrates, for example, as read by Derrida . And certainly in the case of Freud’s Rat Man, the obsessional neurotic, where the Rat Man is exemplarily coached by Freud. The Rat Man was unable to name his symptom or disease, so Freud, filling precisely the space of learning, decides to guess in order to help him. In German, the word is erraten, for guess, so that’s the first “rat” insertion: he is going to rat him out. Freud says the Rat Man, trying to explain, stammers, “and then . . . and then . . . and then,” which is followed by ellipses and a dash, and then Freud writes, “Into his anus, I helped him out.” This, for me, became the paradigm of learning : let me help you out: “—Into his anus, I helped him out.” There’s this kind of moment...