“Each to Each”: A Psychoanalytic Discussion on the Equality of Vulnerability

• In Event: Taking Rancière to School: An Impossible Curriculum

Abstract

In a letter to the French government, Kristeva (2011) proposed the way into a social policy capable of becoming affected by inclusion for people with disabilities. In the spirit of universality, she gave the Revolutionary Slogan its missing link: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and . . . Vulnerability." The ellipsis that accompanies "vulnerability" pressures human rights with the question of the emotional world and its relational challenge of care, dependency, and desire. Kristeva's defense of the human condition leans upon our dependency on others and on symbolization.

This paper brings Kristeva's reframing of equality to Rancière's (1991) study of education, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Certainly their respective contexts and theoretical provocations differ and can easily slide into bifurcation. For Rancière, the philosopher, the assumption is equality of intellect; for Kristeva, the psychoanalyst, equality assumes our constitutive vulnerability, subject to the uncertainties of bios, logos, Eros, and ethnos. Rather than settle into disagreement, their respective requirements for something like equality to happen are treated with the psychoanalytic ethic of attention to the psychical body, composed from and comprised by the urgency of becoming a subject with and for others. I ask what the human condition of vulnerability gives to the equality between intellect and emotional life.

The paper develops a psychoanalytic orientation to specifying the tensions within communication, knowledge, and intersubjectivity. Its "data" draws from previously published psychoanalytical clinical material, selected for its commentary on education and dependency, its discussion of intersubjectivity and the clash of words, and the psychoanalytic theory of transference that peppers the social bond with an unconscious history of love and hate. The clinical work contributes to the paper's theoretical discussion as pressuring equality with scenes of compliance, resistance, belief, and thinking.

This psychoanalytic approach to equality then stems from our beginnings in asymmetrical relations and the therapeutic ethic of curiosity toward the unknown. I suggest a defense of the emotional world or care for inner life as the immaterial condition for the assumption of an equality that can bear asymmetrical relations such as those between teacher and student, patient and analyst, government and citizen. and parent and child. The paper concludes with some speculations on the affective relations made in two insights developed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: first, that pedagogical theory comes with an accident; and second, that one can teach what one does not know. I provide a psychoanalytic formulation of the pedagogical accident that led the schoolmaster to a theory of reading texts he could not read and link this event of "each to each" to the equality of vulnerability.

The paper contributes to a growing interest in psychoanalytic approaches to education and to the need for new discussions unafraid of the emotional world.

Author

• Deborah P. Britzman, York University