ABSTRACT
The claim that teaching and learning are erotic acts is based on a conception of Eros as a life force that pervades human interactions both with other people and with the environment. Alison Pryer (2001, p. 80) argues that pedagogy involves an initiation in which ‘the teacher breaks the student, bringing the student into the death space in order to give new life’. This metaphor is unsettling. Pryer believes that the power relations explicit in technical/rational schooling constitute a violent imposition and points to the way in which schooling is concerned with disciplining the body and suppressing desire but contends that, given the power of Eros and desire, it cannot succeed in such a project.
