Mireille Falardeau et Michel Loranger Le choix de stratégies ... - CSSE

BOOK REVIEWS / RECENSIONS 465
a particular eros that underlies my aspiration for a pedagogy of possibility?”
Seeking to reclaim eros from the throes of sexual objectification and “the
negation of the lived grounds of the other,” Simon posits a pedagogy guided by
a desire that finds expression “in the recognition of the particular dignity of
others, not as objects, but as people with whom mutuality is possible” (p. 72).
Regrettably, Simon avoids the thornier issues surrounding desire, eros, and
pedagogy. The notion of desire itself requires expanded discussion. Simon refers
often to desire at various points in the text, yet the dimensions of desire, in
particular how desire is constituted (and reconstituted), is insufficiently explored.
Certainly, dissatisfaction reminds us that the “crystallization of desire” (p. 4) is
inexact and, in this inexactness, it is often disfigured in a deeply problematic mix
of desire and power/powerlessness. As teachers, then, with “a desire to awake
or incite a particular passion [for social transformation] in those with whom we
teach” (p. 56) and with substantial institutional power, the “design” (p. 71) we
may have on our students is but part of a difficult, disturbing equation in which
desire’s imprecisions and distortions can sharpen the contradictions of eros and
a pedagogy of possibility. As bell hooks (1993) notes, “there is a healing
eroticism in liberation struggle” (p. 127), and it is to the tender spirit of this
eroticism that Simon points. Still, the questions raised by this section do beg a
more substantive development in the name of a pedagogy that dares to name its
desires “against the grain” and amid contemporary distortions where the nexus
of power and desire is oppression and pain.
Appropriately, given the first section of the book, the essay “The Fear of
Theory” introduces the second section, which focuses on issues of practice. Here,
Simon analyzes his own classroom teaching where “counterdiscursive activity”
(p. 60) produces not only the intended “hope-engendering space” (p. 81) but also
“a space provocative of fear” (p. 81). The basis of this fear is “theory’s
disruptive potential” (p. 86) and its “implications for affecting new identities and
disorganizing old ones” (p. 92). Simon develops the idea that the fear might be
understood as an active refusal of or resistance to certain forms of knowledge,
what he calls “the desire to ignore” (p. 95). Drawing in particular on Shoshana
Felman’s work on Jacques Lacan, Simon argues that the fear of theory is
pedagogical opportunity; it is possible to learn about the complex conditions that
form this “dynamic of threat and exclusion” (p. 96). Within a project of
possibility, such learning demands a “dialogic pedagogy” in which teacher and
student work to uncover each other’s “structured resistances ...aswell as the
knowledge of what it is that resists in the other” (p. 97). Despite his acknowledgement
that “the concept of dialogic pedagogy is perhaps one of the most
confused and misdeveloped ideas in the literature on critical teaching” (p. 96),
Simon bypasses the chance to add a substantive contribution to redressing this
problem, a disappointment given the high calibre of his articulation and
clarification of other issues within critical pedagogy.