The ethics of the "real" in levinas, lagan, and buddhism: Pedagogical implications

Educational Theory

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 81-96

  Jagodzinski, Jan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79960231633     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2002.00081.x     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Its two major divisions are Theravadin and Bodhisattva. I will be discussing the salient features that apply to them both.
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Marquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
3. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Transcendence Ends in Politics," In The Subject of Philosophy: Typographies, ed. with foreword Thomas Trezise, trans. Peter Caws (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
5. Poststructuralists and Lacanians hold quite different assumptions about the "subject of discourse." Poststructuralists assert that the subject is created by, derived from, and essentially equivalent to discourse. Discourse contains, causes, manipulates, and composes the subject. Discourse operates the subject as it operates upon the subject. In contrast, the three positions (Lacan, Levinas, and Buddhism) emphasis the "subject" in relation prior to discourse. Attention is on the "ingularity" of the person in the way he manipulates discourse because of his or her own "subject-driven" predispositions. Such subject-specific discourse alters, manipulates, resists, and transforms systems of discourse that impinge. Foucault, for instance, has often been criticized for his failure to acknowledge adequately this will-driven unconscious subject because he dismissed Freud' repression hypothesis. See Marshall Alcorn, Jr., "The Subject of Discourse: Reading Lacan through (and beyond) Poststructuralists Contexts,"in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Fransoise Massardier-Kenney (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 19-45.
6. Thomas S. Popkewitz and Marie Brennan, Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998).
7. This thesis is developed by Jennifer Gore who argues that Foucault's claim that "any knowledge can be dangerous" leads simply to new regimes of truth. Jennifer Gore, The Struggle For Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth (New York: Routledge, 1993).
8. For a representational spectrum see Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
9. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981).
10. On its criticism see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) and Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Moral Theory," in Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
11. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Gutmann, Multiculturalism.
12. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 50. Le visage d'auturi (the face of the other) refers to the personal other as opposed to the category of "Otherness" (L'Auture).
13. Ernesto Laclau, "Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics," In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London and New York: Verso), 82.
14. I am generalizing from Lacanian oeuvre here. For a representative view of his thought see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977).
15. Donna Brody, "Levinas and Lacan: Facing the Real," in Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. Sarah Harasym (Albany: State University of New York, 1998).
16. I am greatly oversimplifying the complexity and subtly with which Lacan's psychic register of the Real plays in his system of thought. Unfamiliarity with Lacan's thought, however, need not hamper the gist of the argument being presented. Daniel Stern's understanding of the core self, for instance, can be roughly equated with Lacan's Real. The "core self" according to Stern is characterized by RIG's (Representation of Interactions that have been Generalized) which are essential synesthetic "feeling patterns." See Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
17. Lacan, "The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits, 1-7.
18. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), 79-85.
19. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, intro. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
20. The ten include training to avoid killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct (body); lying, senseless talk, divisive speech, and harsh speech (speech); covetousness, harmful intent and wrong view (mind). For an overview of Buddhist ethics in regard to adult education see Sonja MacPherson, "The Adulthood of Buddahood: Buddhism, Lifelong Learning, and the Education of Desire," International Journal of Lifelong Education 15, no. 6 (November-December 1996): 455-70.
21. The most notorious case in the academic world is certainly that of fane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
22. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alfonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).
23. Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness (New York: Broadway Books, 1999 xv.
24. Marshall W. Aleorn, "Ideological Death and Grief in the Classroom: Mourning as a Prerequisite to Learning," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 6, no. 2 (2001): 172-80.
25. Some examples would include: What is the sound of one hand clapping? When the many are reduced to the one, to what is the one reduced? Without using your mouth, body, or mind, express yourself. Show me your face before your parents weie born.
26. John R. Suler, "Paradox," in The Couch and the Tree: Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, ed. Anthony Molino (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 325.
27. Masao Abe, "The Self in Jung and Zen," The Eastern Buddhist 28, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 69.
28. Jeffrey Berman, Diaries to an English Professor: Pain and Growth in the Classroom (Amhcrst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
29. Mick Markham, "Everyday Aggressions: Viewing Classroom Conflict through a Lacanian Lens," Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 3, no. 2, 87-98.
30. Buddhism can be accused for being apolitical and patriarchal; Lacan has been accused for his phallogocentric bias; and Levinas for his traditional views on women and his Judaic bias.
31. With Lacan this is particularly the case in his ethics seminar. See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: W.W. Norton, 1992).