Truth and Resistance: Teaching as a Form of Analysis

Truth and Resistance: Teaching as a Form of AnalysisAuthor(s): Patrick McGeeSource: College English, Vol. 49, No. 6, Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy I (Oct., 1987), pp. 667-678Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377810 .

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Patrick McGee

Truth and Resistance: Teaching as a

Form of Analysis

I hadn't realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and study- ing and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know.

Nettie, The Color Purple

The central tasks of pedagogy are, and have always been, to teach others how to teach themselves and to instill the desire to know. The difficulty of teaching lies in the resistance of both student and teacher to the truth underlying the pedagogical act.

"Resistance" is a commonly-used term in both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. It could be argued that, within either discipline, theory encounters practice as a kind of resistance; or that in relation to a psychoanalytic theory of teaching, pedagogy as practice assumes some autonomy in resisting the theory on which it is founded. Unlike traditional pedagogy, however, psychoanalysis can claim a co- herent relation between theory and practice as part of its self-definition: everything that psychoanalysis teaches derives from the dynamics of a particular drama, that unfolding between the analyst and the analysand. Crucial to this drama is the education of the analyst, which itself hinges on an analysis that teaches theory through practice. Freud believed that no amount of theoretical instruction could convince his students of the truth of psychoanalysis even where there was a strong wish to be convinced. Consequently, he required that "every- one who wishes to treat others by analysis should first undergo an analysis himself. Only in the course of this 'self-analysis' [by which Freud means 'training analysis'] . . . , when he actually experiences in his own person, or rather in his own psyche, the processes asserted by analysis to take place, does he acquire the convictions by which he will later be guided as an analyst" (Question 39).

The truth of psychoanalytic theory can be grasped only through the subjective experience of psychoanalysis. But this truth has less to do with the verification

Patrick McGee is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Recently, he has published articles on William Faulkner, James Joyce, and contemporary criticism. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 1988 entitled Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's " Ulysses."

College English, Volume 49, Number 6, October 1987 667



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of content than with the production of a particular effect within the guidelines dictated by theory. The goal of analysis, writes Lacan, can only be "the advent of a true speech and the realization by the subject of his history in his relation to a future" (Selection 88). It is difficult to imagine a pedagogy, however deeply rooted in positivist thinking, that would not claim this goal as its own, although there is no general theory of teaching, no commanding metapedagogy corre- sponding to Freud's metapsychology, to articulate the object and goal of teaching. Is it possible to articulate such an object and goal?

It seems to me that one begins answering such a question not by reviewing all the positivist research currently in progress, mostly in the field of composition, but by returning to the scene in which the theory of teaching must discover its object: the scene of instruction. This is not to devalue positivist research, particularly insofar as it gives us a more detailed grasp of the sociology of learning. But experimental research without an adequate theory of teaching, by presup- posing that the goal of education is given, may uncritically reinforce ideological tendencies from outside the field of education. Such tendencies ought to be the objects of the critical perception that teaching instills, not the unexamined ground of educational research. Nevertheless, returning to the scene of instruction involves more than reconstructing the institutional context of classroom work, as Les Perelman recently argued. It requires that we go back to the socially symbolic ground of the pedagogical act itself, to its condition of pos- sibility. Freud made such a return when he put away the project for a psychology on the model of classical science and began to examine in its own terms the inner dynamics of the analytic situation. In this return, he discovered the real object of psychoanalysis in the speech of his patients and in their resistance to speech-a resistance that, from the Lacanian viewpoint, could be read as a resistance to language as a system and to everything that is structured like a language. Freud never underestimated the power of speech and admitted to the hy- pothetical Impartial Person in The Question of Lay Analysis that, ultimately, psychoanalysis was just a matter of words (21-22). He speculated in the same work that a truly effective preparation for the practice of psychoanalysis would include instruction in "the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and literature" (118). Lacan, in reading Freud, takes a more emphatic stand on this issue by adding to the list: "rhetoric, dialectic in the technical sense that this term assumes in the Topics of Aristotle, grammar, and, that su- preme pinnacle of the aesthetics of language, poetics, which would include the neglected technique of the witticism." The education of the analyst, from this perspective, overlaps in significant ways with that of the teacher of language and literature. Furthermore, Lacan points out that "psychoanalysis in its early development . . . was on the way to participating in the structure of what was called in the Middle Ages, 'the liberal arts.' Deprived, like them, of a true formalization, psychoanalysis became organized, like them, in a body of privileged problems" (Selection 76).

To an extent, this historical tendency continues in the work of thinkers like Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse who treat psychoanalysis as one more approach to and possible solution of the specific problems and contradictions of



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Western culture. In Lacan's reading of Freud, however, the beginning of a "true formalization" becomes possible: "Psychoanalysis will provide scientific bases for its theory or for its technique only by formalizing in an adequate fashion the essential dimension of its experience which together with the historical theory of the symbol, are: intersubjective logic and the temporality of the subject." This statement sums up the import of Lacan's enormous project, which intends to bring "the psychoanalytic experience back to speech and language as its grounding" (Selection 77).

The teacher of language and literature recognizes a similar grounding to his or her own experience. Particularly, one could argue, the "historical theory of the symbol" crucial to the formalization of psychoanalysis owes a debt to those linguistic laborers in the classroom and the library who have provided us with whatever knowledge we have under the heading of rhetoric and poetics. If these same laborers have little knowledge of or interest in "intersubjective logic" and "the temporality of the subject," we can only ask: why should they? Their business is not to cure but to inform; and, although composition theorists argue on the basis of empirical data for the need to develop techniques of overcoming the resistance to learning language, teaching is still essentially understood, once we get beyond the kindergarten level, as a cognitive process. Paul de Man, in an essay to which I will have occasion to return, speaks for the teaching profession when he says:

Overfacile opinion notwithstanding, teaching is not primarily an intersubjective re- lationship between people but a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved. The only teaching worthy of the name is scholarly, not personal; analogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are more often than not excuses for having abdicated the task. (4)

Unlike psychoanalysis, teaching involves a transfer of knowledge that exists in- dependently of the two subjects implicated in the act itself. De Man's emphasis on the supremacy of cognition in pedagogy (and, by implication, his portrait of the teacher as the one who really knows or at least should know) reflects what I believe to be a very common suspicion among college teachers today: the suspicion that someone has abdicated his or her task-that, in spite of the continuous outflow of printed matter on the subject, real teaching rarely takes place any- more (if, the more sceptical would say, it ever did). More often than not, this charge is aimed at elementary, high school, and college English teachers.

But surely these are the scapegoats of a structural problem within the institu- tion itself. It is not simply that students can't write, but that they challenge the need for writing; for when it comes to language their minds always seem elsewhere-they can make words but they can't give meaning to their lives and history. Failing to grasp the full implication of their words, they can't speak the truth and often appear not to know what their language knows. The teacher hears the voice of others in their writing and speech (plagiarism being only the extreme case of the general rule), while students insist, often with the indigna- tion of outraged landlords, that the voice is theirs. Experience teaches us that



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students don't lie. They simply misconstrue. But the way into their misconstruc- tions is a labyrinth most teachers hesitate to enter for lack of time and support. Out of frustration, they go on correcting commas, writing composition text- books, and generally knocking their heads against the wall of a resistance to language that may be their own as much as it is their students'.

To clarify my comments, I want to consider in more detail Lacan's idea of "true speech." In the analytic situation, true speech is not speech addressed to the interlocutor as other, as the one from whom the subject anticipates a reply that somehow answers to his or her desire and removes the lack, or feeling of incompleteness and uncertainty, from which desire arises in the first place. Sur- prisingly, Lacan refers to this as "empty speech," because with it the subject seeks his or her meaning not in the relation to language and, more generally, to the symbolic order (the totality of signifying systems, including language itself and everything structured like a language: fashions, rituals, aesthetic and culi- nary tastes, social mores and values, etc.)-they seek meaning in the other. Now this other from whom the subject seeks meaning, the answer to a question, is the subject who is supposed to know. As Lacan points out, as soon as there is a subject who is supposed to know, there is transference; and the pursuit of knowledge is bound up with transference as "the enacting of the reality of the unconscious" (Four 174).

Freud defined transference as an inherent or learned disposition in the subject, "a special individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love": "This forms a cliche or stereotype in him . . . , which perpetually repeats and repro- duces itself as life goes on, in so far as external circumstances and the nature of accessible love-objects permit, and is indeed itself to some extent modifiable by later impressions" ("Dynamics" 312-13). Insofar as the subject of analysis locates the meaning of his or her own history in the analyst, he or she engages in a transferential relation that amounts to a rhetorical clich6. It is not that the subject's speech communicates nothing, but that what it communicates must be de- ciphered or separated out from the empty speech or clich6 that frames it. In- deed, as Lacan emphasizes,

however empty this discourse may seem, it is so only if taken at its face value: that which justifies the remark of Mallarme's [translator's error, should read "Mallarm6"], in which he compares the common use of language to the exchange of a coin whose obverse and reverse no longer bear any but effaced figures, and which people pass from hand to hand "in silence." This metaphor is enough to re- mind us that speech, even when almost completely worn out, retains its value as tessera. (Selection 43)

Recognizing the value of empty speech as tessera (that is, as a sumbolon, a mark or token, the part of a whole used as a sign of recognition) leads back to the relation of speech to the symbolic order from which it is constituted. The

analyst's task, in other words, is not to answer the subject's question, for that would only lead to a further repetition of the transference; by playing the part of the other, the analyst would endorse a theatre-of-the-absurd such as one finds in the plays of Beckett, a scene of endless repetition and linguistic exhaustion. On the contrary, the analyst takes the speech that has been handed to him or her,




the tessera, and returns it to the subject in silence. In doing so, he or she returns the subject and its material support, the word, back to the symbolic order, the signifying chain, that subverts the relation between analyst and analysand as self and other (a relation that moves in two directions) and discloses its symbolic truth as the relation of subject to subject. The subject must then learn how to read his or her word not as an address to the other, or the subject who is supposed to know, but to the Other with a capital O. In discovering the meaning of speech as the discourse of the Other, of the symbolic order or culture, the subject speaks truth or the full word towards which the analyst is able to direct him or her through a specific style of intervention: "the analyst can play on the power of the symbol by evoking it in a carefully calculated fashion in the seman- tic resonances of his remarks" (Lacan, Selection 82).

It should be clear from what I have said that the intersubjective logic which defines psychoanalysis according to Lacan is the logic of the signifier, of the word in its rhetorical dimension. By deflecting the subject away from the cognitive function of language that responds instrumentally to the desire for final- ized meaning, toward the rhetorical function of the word within a symbolic system that includes moral conventions, ideologies, aesthetic values, and so forth- analysis also makes it possible for the subject to confront its own temporality and thus to see beyond the illusion of autonomy to the implication of the subject in cultural processes. On the one hand, the discovery of the subject's implication in the symbolic severely limits his or her freedom. On the other, it makes possible the "little freedom" with which the subject reorders "past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come" (Selection 48).

It follows from this that psychoanalysis has political implications. As Lacan insisted repeatedly in his polemical war with American ego psychology, the ego is not the agency of reality but the effect of meconnaissance (a misunderstanding or misconstruction of the "real"). Analysis should not seek to strengthen the ego and the subject's sense of reality as something out there to which it must conform but to decenter it by returning the subject to some understanding of the social and personal (that is, symptomatic) narratives from which it derives. The art of the analyst is not to lead the subject back to self-certainty but "to suspend the subject's certainties until their last mirages have been consumed" (Selection 43).

It follows that "truth" for Lacan is never empirical and verifiable, not in and of itself knowledge, but a relation to knowledge, a relation to language, that involves the subject's recognition of the ground of its knowledge in a particular fiction or narrative. "Truth" is recognition of the rhetorical dimension underlying every cognition. With this truth, the subject rediscovers its place in a narrative from which its consciousness has been withheld. Thereafter, if it cannot simply step outside this fiction into a world of total freedom, it can at least reorder and redirect its past to anticipate and account for a future. For a Marxist thinker like Fredric Jameson, this truth reaches far beyond the psychoanalytic scene itself to entail a collective human relation to "the essential mystery of the cultural past." Historical problems, he writes, "can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single collective story. . . . It is in detecting



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the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity" (19-20). Only by grasping the symbolic function of history itself can "we" remodel the past in order to arrive at a future that, for example, escapes the inevitable destruction prepared for us by the contemporary archons of human nature and their re- pressive narratives (including scientific determinism, conservative Christianity, and so forth).

Jameson's generalization of psychoanalytic into historical truth makes a con- venient bridge from the analyst's office to the university classroom. Recently in one of my composition classes, a young woman who had been reading about the planned reorganization of the university's core curriculum asked why the Eng- lish Department should be the hub on which the whole plan depended. Why, she asked, is English so important? She was honest enough to admit that she had never cared for reading and found writing to be irrelevant to her life and inter- ests. When I pointed out that English was her language and the medium of com- munication at her university, she quickly responded that she found it difficult to relate her everyday use of language, even at school, to what happens in an Eng- lish course. She had no difficulty communicating directly through speech with her instructors and friends; but whenever she had to write or pay attention to how texts are written, she felt paralyzed. Writing on topics I had given, which involved thinking about rhetorical strategies and an audience, irritated her enor- mously because she could not say what she thought. Worst of all, even when she read essays on topics that interested her, she could not enjoy them because she had to pay attention to words themselves and how they are put together. In writing and reading for the course, she found that language seemed to become un- familiar; even the simplest texts became unbearably difficult when she had to analyze them rhetorically. She thought it should be enough to agree or disagree with, to like or dislike, an essay.

My student's attitude is not unrepresentative, and the least one can say is that her remarks illustrate the view that language-teaching involves not only eradicat- ing ignorance but overcoming resistance. A teacher of composition and literature, like a teacher of physics, surely passes on some quantity of objective or objectifiable information to students. But, as we all claim, the goal of education is to have students achieve a degree of development wherein they no longer re- quire a teacher for access to information or knowledge. In other words, I cannot imagine any teaching "worthy of the name" founded primarily on the cognitive function of language, for such a pedagogy would inevitably inform its students with a false concept of and relation to language. It would lead (and perhaps has already led) to a generation of college graduates who are shocked when they read Swift's "A Modest Proposal" or who believe that Huckleberry Finn merely propagates racial stereotyping. To state it bluntly, many students (and not only in basic English courses) identify true speech as a simple and direct expression of what they think. Such speech effaces language before the radiance of subjective "truth." This view, as Jacques Derrida suggests, is supported by the in- stitution of Western education from Plato to the present, which takes as its ideal




"the effacement of language," understood here in its material, rhetorical dimension (93-94). Reinforcing this perspective, and the self-certainty usually accom- panying it, only strengthens the resistance to language and, thus, to the symbolic order. It disables the subject from recognizing its position within a culture that defines and limits it but also provides it with the material ground of social change. Such a method allows transference to operate blindly instead of exploit- ing its power for cultural transformation. Traditional pedagogy, as another symptom of post-Cartesian ideology like American ego psychology, guarantees the illusion of individual autonomy at the expense of the "little freedom" that makes it possible for a subject to enter the collective process of symbolization, to construct a narrative of the future that refuses to be another farce, another blind transference.

Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory" (which I quoted earlier) offers a perspective on the rhetorical dimension in pedagogy similar to that of psychoanalysis. Ironically, although de Man's essay begins with the assertion that pedagogy is a cognitive process, it goes on to demonstrate the impossibility of a pure cognition in a medium as problematic as language. Without directly refer- ring to Freud or Lacan, he draws an unmistakable parallel between psychoanalysis and literary theory in their respective relations to the objects they study. He argues that although a theory should not start out from pragmatic con- siderations, it cannot avoid such methodological impurity "if the condition of existence of an entity is itself particularly critical": "The difficult and in- conclusive history of literary theory indicates that this is indeed the case for literature in an even more manifest manner than for other verbalized occurences such as jokes, for example, or even dreams" (5). Literary theory, like psychoanalytic theory, develops in relation to a particular practice, a concrete analysis of the literary text. Insofar as it is a "controlled reflection" on the method of this practice, de Man sees it as "entirely compatible with teaching" (4), since, as in a training-analysis, one arrives at a knowledge of literature by learning a technique. Nevertheless, the reliability of the method should depend on that of the knowledge it produces; but in the case of both literary theory and psychoanalysis, it is uncertain that such reliability can be demonstrated. As Lacan im- plies, psychoanalysis does not teach knowledge but truth, and it seems to me that de Man's thought moves toward a similar formulation when he directly con- fronts the resistance to theory as a misunderstanding of "literariness" itself:

The most misleading representation of literariness, and also the most recurrent ob- jection to contemporary literary theory, considers it as pure verbalism, as a denial of the reality principle in the name of absolute fictions, and for reasons that are said to be ethically and politically shameful. The attack reflects the anxiety of the ag- gressors rather than the guilt of the accused. By allowing for the necessity of a non- phenomenal linguistics, one frees the discourse on literature from naive oppositions between fiction and reality, which are themselves an offspring of an uncritically mi- metic conception of art. In a genuine semiology as well as in other linguistically ori- ented theories, the referential function of language is not being denied--far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition. Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge "reality," but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to the principles



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which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language. (11)

For de Man, the resistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical dimension of language, to the signifier as tessera in a symbolic exchange whose inner logic contradicts, in significant ways, the order of reality. De Man's use of the word "reality" is related to Lacan's order of the "real," which cannot be repre- sented; for, if the term refers to anything, it refers to the limit of the experience of representation. The real is essentially "the missed encounter" (Lacan, Four 55); it lies precisely in the awareness that language has a referential function, that it produces a "reality-effect" (see Barthes), which cannot be identified with the real. Literature, thus, could be described as the experience of the missed encounter with the real insofar as it foregrounds the rhetorical dimension and forces the reader into the awareness of language as language, as a symbolic system whose functions cannot be reduced to intuition. De Man seems to suggest that the resistance to contemporary theory is only the most recent symptom of the resistance to literature and to language in its ineffaceable materiality. Liter- ature is not a reliable source of information about the reality outside of language, but it does teach the truth of that reality as the failure of language in the experience of "the missed encounter." To argue that linguistic reference articulates the real confuses distinctly different registers of human experience and rein- forces the imaginary present of the "ego" at the expense of the historical subject embedded in largely unconscious narrative structures. Against the claim that truth lies in the referential function, and that literary theory as "the use of language about language" (de Man 12) obscures that function by drawing attention to the rhetorical dimension underlying it, teachers such as Freud, Lacan or de Man engage in a practice which is brilliantly formulated by de Man in this aphorism: "it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true" (4).

Is the lesson to be drawn from psychoanalysis and its nearest relative, literary theory, the paradox that in order to succeed the teacher must fail? First, it is necessary to read de Man's aphorism rhetorically. To fail in teaching means to fail in "the only teaching worthy of the name"-that is, teaching as a cognitive process. If the teacher succeeds in directing his or her students toward a relation to language, toward a refusal to see language as a transparent medium of intuition, then it is inevitable that he or she will call into question the cognitive function of their own discourse. The teacher who succeeds in reducing language to its cognitive function so that the student encounters knowledge as an intuition virtually erasing language in its material dimension-such a teacher teaches what is not true, at least in the psychoanalytic sense of that word. He or she fails to teach the truth of the symbolic order, the cultural frame and linguistic conventions that make knowledge possible in the first place. De Man's aphorism thus deploys the figure of irony and cannot be read as a prescription for practice. I mean simply that it cannot be followed literally because its truth is not trans- parently referential but figurative. Indeed, the entirety of "The Resistance to Theory" is structured by the figure of irony, not in the way it subverts its overt




claim that teaching is a cognitive process (which is stable irony) but in the way it pursues knowledge through a use of language that is self-critical about the drift of words into figurative patterns that undo the transparency of cognition. It pos- sesses, in other words, the structure of unstable irony. De Man does not declare himself for or against cognition; he merely shows that the cognitive function of language or the use of language to attain or to transfer knowledge leads to the knowledge of a rhetorical dimension of language that subverts the purity of cognition. The cognitive function of language is a use of language that resists language. Only from this perspective can one understand the article's ironic conclu- sion: "Yet literary theory is not in danger of going under; it cannot help but flourish, and the more it is resisted, the more it flourishes, since the language it speaks is the language of self-resistance. What remains impossible to decide is whether this flourishing is a triumph or a fall" (19-20). With this last flourish, de Man locates his argument within a traditional topic (is language the sign of man's fall or his triumph?) and illustrates once again the critical power of transference.

Nevertheless, de Man's article teaches through its practice. It is impossible to read de Man without confronting language itself and, therefore, the resistance to language that our desire for knowledge necessarily produces. Reading is a form of transference insofar as it is rule-governed, insofar as the reader approaches the text with an unconscious predisposition to finding a given set of predictable meanings and argumentative structures. When it is read, the text assumes---or creates for itself-the position of the subject who is supposed to know; and what he or she is supposed to know refers to the symbolic formation of the reader in a particular relation to culture. Any text, of course, offers a resistance to an over- ly facile reading; and readers avoid reading precisely to the extent that they cling to a transferential relation that refuses to allow for any textual play exceeding the boundaries of their preestablished expectations. De Man teaches by first se- ducing the reader and then betraying him or her. He seduces by capturing the reader's desire for knowledge; then he betrays that desire by directing it not toward extinction in the self-certainty of fulfilled expectations but toward the de- stabilization of self through the discovery of desire as a force excentric to the subject. Desire is discovered as the force of language, of the historical chain of words and conventions, of ideologies and knowledges, of the symbolic order.

Is it de Man's intention to produce this effect on the reader? It is not a question of intention, I would suggest, but of style. In foregrounding the rhetorical dimension of his writing, in accenting those material aspects of his language that tend to displace the stable meanings derived from a preestablished code of grammar and logic-to that extent de Man has given space to the particular kind of knowledge that has been the specific contribution of psychoanalysis to modern culture.

In the Yale French Studies issue on pedagogy, Shoshana Felman identifies the knowledge that psychoanalysis produces, the knowledge that Freud derived from the least reliable sources-literature, dreams, and patients-as "a knowledge which is not authoritative, which is not that of a master, a knowledge which does not know what it knows, and is thus not in possession of itself' (40). This knowledge she calls literary; and if one relates it to what de Man (after the



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Russian formalists) calls "literariness," then it is the knowledge of language about language, the only real knowledge that language can deliver. Literary knowledge is knowledge that does not know its own meaning because its meaning always lies elsewhere, in the relation to a symbolic dimension whose resonances are heard in the specific text or speech act-in the recognition of de Man's "rhetorical or tropological dimension of language ... which can be re- vealed in any verbal event when it is read textually" (de Man 17). Any verbal event can be read textually, but some verbal events immediately insist upon it. In effect, Lacan's greatly misunderstood "return to Freud" means precisely a return to Freud's text, to its textual knowledge which, historically, the institu- tion of psychoanalysis has left largely unexplored. If the meaning Lacan derives from Freud's text somehow seems at variance with the authoritative statements of the master, this is because, as Felman puts it, "Lacan is 'taught' by Freud in much the same way Freud is 'taught' by dreams; Lacan reads Freud in much the same way Freud reads Oedipus the King, specifically seeking in the text its literary knowledge" (42). Lacan, in reading Freud, uses Freud's own method of reading; he approaches Freud's text as the analyst approaches the speech of the analysand; through a reading, he attempts to return Freud's text to its truth. "The truth," he writes, "is perhaps simply one thing, namely, the desire of Freud himself, the fact that something in Freud was never analyzed" (Four 12). In his own teaching, Lacan demonstrates and invites the same procedure by transforming himself into "the analysand of his Seminar" (Felman 38) and giv- ing play to the rhetorical dimension of his language. Thus, according to Felman,

Psychoanalysis as teaching, and teaching as psychoanalysis, radically subvert the demarcation-line, the clear-cut opposition between the analyst and the analysand, between the teacher and the student (or the learner)--showing that what counts, in both cases, is precisely the transition, the struggle-filled passage from one position to the other. But the passage itself is interminable. (38)

The implications of psychoanalysis for pedagogy lie in this transition. A teacher who would teach his or her students a relation to language must come before them not as a master, even though he or she knows and even uses their presumption of the teacher's knowledge. He or she comes before them as the learner, the analysand, the subject who speaks more than it knows. It is not easy to do this, and it requires that the teacher have a specific k'nd of education, a textual or literary knowledge of language. Since students usually assume themselves to be the analysand vis-A-vis the teacher, the teacher must reverse the situation and hand their questions back to them in a way that reveals a rhetorical function. When the students address the teacher as the other, the subject who is supposed to know, the teacher must redirect the question to the Other, with a capital O, to the symbolic order from which the question emerged in the first place. In other words, to the student's demand, "Tell me the truth. What is the secret of writing?", the teacher who answers with a formula or who decides to write yet another "how to" textbook succeeds only in mystifying the student's relation to language by reinforcing the illusion that teachers actually know what they are supposed to know-an illusion quickly dispelled by a visit to a writing conference.




The same rule applies to the teacher of literature who substitutes an appeal to the authorities for the more complicated performance of a public interpretation that challenges the student to dialogue. At the same time, it is not enough simply to let the student speak. In this age of bureaucratic terrorism, teachers often take the greatest comfort in knowing that students are "happy" to talk in class. Silence of the right kind can be an authentic dialogical response, while speech that merely reflects the presuppositions of the learning subject is simply a transference that encounters no resistance. For there is nothing wrong with resistance if it can be led back to the knowledge of what it resists. When students speak critically, when they see more in the words of the teacher than the teacher knows, when they come to understand that the knowledge they seek is neither in the teacher nor in themselves but in the common ground that brings teacher and student together (language, culture, history, the Other)--at such a moment they arrive at the goal of education: truth.

For Lacan, the only teaching worthy of the name occurs "where the most hidden truth becomes manifest in the revolutions of culture." He also teaches that the most hidden truth, like the purloined letter of Poe, is always out in the open where anyone can see it. The most hidden truth is language, and the way to this truth is "the only education we can claim to transmit to those who follow us. It is called-a style" (Ecrits 458). However, style in this context is not a question of the right words in their proper order or of asserting linguistic authority and mastery. On the contrary, it means the disclosure of a relation to language as the Other through an exhibition that is never entirely in the hands of the exhibitionist. The force of pedagogy lies close to farce, and so the pedagogue has always been a comic figure. But if teaching frequently evokes laughter, it is sometimes the critical laughter of a resistance that knows its relation to the "slippage" in pedagogy between cognition and performance. It knows truth as the necessity of "failure" in the only teaching "worthy of the name."

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "L'effet de reel." Communications 11 (1968): 84-89. de Man, Paul. "The Resistance to Theory." The Resistance to Theory. Minne-

apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 3-20.

Derrida, Jacques. "Living On: Borderlines." Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Seabury, 1979. 75-175.

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Truth and Resistance: Teaching as a Form of Analysis

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