Impudent practices

Abstract

This article explores aspects of eros in education in relation to ideas of indirectness associated with the French concept of pudeur, sometimes translated as ‘modesty’. It explores lines of thought extending through Emerson and Nietzsche but reaching back to Plato's Symposium. This is a means of exposing the ‘impudence’ of some aspects of contemporary education and of pointing towards a conception of eros that is otherwise obscured.

Keywords::

• eros
• Plato's Symposium
• Emerson
• Nietzsche
• Derrida

Notes

^1. Which in turn, if it is not already obvious, alludes also to what is coyly referred to as the ‘F-word’. The lexical tensions abound.

^2. See http://www.sex-lexis.com/Sex-Dictionary/pudendum (accessed on 4 October 2011).

^3. The contrasts, which are being drawn too quickly here, are intended to serve partly as a heuristic, and they scarcely do justice to Brit Art. However much qualities of brashness may be apparent, there is more going on. Damien Hirst's diamond-skull, entitled For the Love of God, invites interpretation in multiple ways – say, as a comment on the art market or in relation to the vanity of human desire. (Online at: http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god. Accessed 20 July 2014.) Tracey Emin's ‘tent’, entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963–1995 (), repudiates hasty responses when one is reminded of the different reasons why might sleep alongside someone else (the period in question dates from the time of the artist's birth), while the particular nature of the tent itself (a poleless igloo rather than a ridge tent) has feminine rather than masculine connotations. (Online at: http://www.saatchigallery.com/aipe/tracey_emin.htm. Accessed 20 July 2014.)

^4. For the background to these claims, see Standish (1991, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2010, 2013).

^5. For examples of the arguments behind these claims, see Hodgson and Standish (2008) and Standish (2001).

^6. The point being emphasised here is the conceptual lineage of these ways of thinking and the continuing effects of the now discredited logical positivism that was in its hey-day in philosophy some 60–90 years ago. For further discussion, see, for example, Standish (2012).

^7. See, for example, Standish (1995).

^8. See, for example, Standish (2003). See also LaCapra (2001).

^9. There is a new historiography that has developed around this – see, for example, Dominick LaCapra. See also Standish (2008).

^10. Derrida and Levinas might be seen as working with this negativity of thought, while Kierkegaard and, before him, the negative theology of Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius figure in the background. It can be contrasted with an affirmative strand in poststructuralism exemplified by Deleuze and, to some extent, Foucault, as well as by Lyotard in some phases of his writings. For a fuller account, see Standish (2004).

^11. See Stone (2006) and Hodgson and Standish (2006).

^12. Knowingness of this kind has contributed to gross distortions in the reading of poststructuralist thought in educational research: to put this briefly, the terms of poststructuralism were grafted onto the well-established growths of neo-marxist new sociology of knowledge and of identity politics in the name of something that came to be known as ‘postmodernist educational research’.

^13. As far as I can see, Poirier's quotation of this last sentence is a contemporary paraphrase, and it seems appropriate in spirit.

^14. See Heidegger (1978).

^15. Note the etymological embedding of such ideas of containment and gripping in ‘concept’ and Begriff, the philosopher's stock-in-trade.

^16. The etymologising in Plato's text has been criticised, but there is in contemporary research, it seems, a prevailing view that confirms the derivation of ήρως (hero) either from ϵρως (love) or from ϵρϵιν (say, speak). I am grateful to Marianna Papastephanou for advice about this.

^17. Of course it depends what crime series you watch. Plainly this is a caricature.

^18. As also for further forms of education that could be elaborated, where, for example, one side of the triangle – say the personal relationship between teacher and student – is given prominence at the expense of attention to content, the proper focus of that relationship.

^19. Oakeshott speaks of ‘the conversation of mankind’ (1959).