Now Published
Love and Desire in Education: A Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (Winter 2019)
‘Why is love thrown to the wind, why is it refused an erotic rationality…? The answer is not hidden far away: because love is defined as a passion, and therefore as a derivative modality, indeed as optional to the “subject,” who is defined by exercise of their rationality exclusively appropriate to objects and to beings.’ (Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon)
If Marion is right that modern philosophy has dismissed love, the implications for education are profound. For education is founded upon the erotic phenomenon and yet the tensions around educational eros make that nearly unspeakable, and often unthinkable. This special issue addresses the provocative ideas of the educational recovery of the erotic phenomenon in all its manifold registers.
Children learn how to think and what to know, but do they learn how to love or what to desire? Does desire need to be educated, or love learnt? Love and desire appear as spontaneous and effervescent affirmations of the world in infancy. Yet the idea of the formation of desire signals a clear link with education, suggesting that the primal libidinal energy of human desire is not simply given, but plastic. While most parents would acknowledge some role in the rearrangement of desire, what really is at stake when we want our children to want more, or to want differently? These are dangerous ideas, since they suggest that desire itself can be altered, either through implicit socialization, the reorientation of natural energies, benign education or more intrusive forms of behavior modification. Is there really a difference between intrusive modification, and natural reorientation? Do such ideas entail the breaking-in of the subject, the crushing of the human spirit, or perhaps, as Gayatri Spivak characterized a human education, the “uncoercive rearrangement of desire”? And if family and friends have some role in this kind of Bildung, what role does the state have? Do states have a responsibility to articulate what ought to be loved? And what of culture itself: are not bildungsroman tales of love and the self coming into being? Is there, any such thing as an uneducated desire, or pure libido? In the context of neo-liberalism, the question of what and how to love or to desire becomes an urgent educational question as children’s desire is supressed, manipulated or commodified as a form of capital. Does the tendency to focus on the education and development of reason leads us to overlook the formation of desire?
This special issue brings together a range of discussions, philosophical, literary, historical and psychological, of the ways that the erotic phenomenon presses upon modern educational theories and practices. The authors share a concern in rehabilitating love and desire to educational discourse though with divergent ideas concerning how that could or should be achieved.
Editors
David Lewin (University of Strathclyde, UK)
David Aldridge (Brunel University, UK)