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THREE: A Risky Commitment: The Ambiguity and Ambivalence of Love
- State University of New York Press
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Communication with the other can be transcendent only as a dangerous life, a fine risk to be run. —Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence WHAT DO LOVE and eros1 have to offer a discussion on the ethical possibilities of education? In considering the work across differences that social justice education engages in, how might that most seemingly private of emotions , love, lend itself to such work? Does eros have anything to do with learning from and not merely about the Other? These questions are by no means easy to answer, for love is a difficult place to begin to think about ethical possibility within the framework of social justice. Indeed, love is difficult to think about, period. It seems to defy adequate description, its depth and texture evoked most powerfully in poetry and literature rather than in philosophy or psychoanalysis. In terms of social justice education, love takes on a particular difficulty, given that the feeling of love, unlike empathy, is a seemingly rare attachment that the self holds for a unique Other, one that demands something far greater of us in terms of commitment, concern, and responsibility. In addition , love is thought to be reserved for only a few people in our lives, as opposed to empathy, which is presumably more far reaching. In light of this, love would thus seem to be a much too narrow and exclusive feeling to be of any value to education per se. Moreover, to suggest that love might have ethical significance would also bring into focus the place of intimacy and desire between teachers and students themselves, and this would present its own 65 THREE A RISKY COMMITMENT: THE AMBIGUITY AND AMBIVALENCE OF LOVE difficulties for thinking through what might be a responsible response to an other, given the institutional constraints of pedagogical practice that frown upon such intimacy. It is for these reasons, in my view, that the focus on issues such as empathy, recognition, and care has eclipsed considerations about what love and eros have to offer to working across differences as an ethical project.2 For instance, as Kelly Oliver notes, in the struggle for recognition within discourses of multiculturalism, there is a dire absence of love in advocating for ethical and political responsibility.3 Such an absence seems to suggest that there is something dangerous about love, and all its attendant attributes, for it challenges the relative innocence of our institutional relationships . Moreover, to suggest that our responsibility might lie within an apparent rarified sanctity of intimacy troubles our understanding of the explicitly social character of responsibility that social justice education attempts to animate. Yet one of the most obvious aims in social justice education is to arouse responsibility through “developing” concern for and connection to the lives of “Others,” which, like all demands, is by no means innocent. The call to be concerned for an other, often summoned through the pedagogical practice of exposure to another’s suffering, seems to me to assume that profound feelings of intimacy are required to mobilize such concern, for the type of concern that social justice strives to achieve is no mere intellectual “interest” or “curiosity,” but optimally a committed regard for the suffering of an other that has the potential to lead to responsibility and hopefully to responsible action. Indeed, I think implicit in such commitment is a demand for students to become enamored with a cause, an idea, or the condition of a particular person to the point of wanting to do something about the debilitating social conditions that produce such suffering. We often speak of passion as a sign of committed responsibility, and teachers often hope that students will be moved to such a point of intensity. The engrossment and passion attached to such commitment are suggestive of the way eros is mobilized in developing a responsible concern for the Other. While teachers, of course, do not literally demand that students fall in love with the Other, and students rarely identify their responses to the Other directly in terms of such love, I do think that love needs to be more thoroughly analyzed with respect to what it contributes to establishing the solicitude and, ultimately, the responsibility that we are seeking through our pedagogies. As I discussed in the previous chapter, such responsibility is seen to be grounded in certain configurations of otherness and togetherness that have the capacity to move students out of their supposed complacency and into a mode of being-for the Other that...