Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

Implications for teaching
“‘What is it in the Other that I have lost?’ – posits the ‘I’ in the mode of unknowingness”
is how Judith Butler in her book Precarious Life. The Powers of
Mourning and Violence 27 (Butler 2004b, 30) explored the very momentum of
facing loss. It can be a moving point from where we may begin a reflection of
how this issue, as one of the most vulnerable and profound of life’s experiences,
can affect teaching, both the content and meaning of teaching.
The task is implicitly harsh as there is a dense web of human dilemmas
that at the same time prevents us from going beyond the conventional
order usually embedded in a memoryscape or locked in secure public rituals of
mourning but also challenges us to find potential answers.
Loss, particularly the loss of dear ones, underlies a complexity of uncertainties
that refers to various points, concerns and states of emotion, yet there
are some opportunities for openness to often unanswerable and unreachable
questions. What are the transformative effects of loss? Can students identify
with one’s own loss and is the classroom a suitable place for a fruitful exchange
of these transformational opportunities? What are the outcomes that have
effects that differ from the effects of the process of healing? How to teach,
or rather what to teach when human loss is accompanied with grieving and
unexplainable vulnerability matters? Emotional exposure, human rupture,
grieving, human bonding, work at mourning?
Derrida was quite precise saying that there is no possibility of being
taught how to live or how to accept death. Humans are, in his view, “all
survivors on deferral” (Derrida 2004) but also inheritors of others with whom
they feel an affinity. Coming back to Butler’s previous point, I found here a
kind of interrelatedness as well as a potential for, or promise of, a departure.
The position of the Self as unknowingness in a situation of the loss of
the Other, although presuming an uneasiness, anxiety, despair and drifting,
means above all ‘I’ “as infinite layers” 28 , never unified, total, closed but impregnated
and embodied by and through others, and in that sense Self functions
in a particular way as an inheritor of them (others). Therefore, the importance
of inventing new theorising and teaching methods relating to loss, mourning
and grief, despite all epistemological and human limitations and ambiguity,
is present and could be developed in a few directions. First, one should offer
27
Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).
28
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman Native Other (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94.
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