ABSTRACT
Teaching Mahmoud Darwish implies the teaching, reading, and study of his language and writing–it implies his writing becoming an object of study and teaching in the university but it also occasions one's learning to read the teaching imparted by Mahmoud Darwish. Language, in Darwish, does not confirm identity–the identity of the poem with itself, of the reader with the time to which he or she is said to belong, or of the relation between the teacher and the student–but forms an occasion for the interruption of each of these. 'Love' is a word with which Darwish speaks of this difficulty. Yet love, in Darwish, does not occasion a fusion of the self with another, or, in the field of language, a comprehension of language in the time of its reading. So to teach Mahmoud Darwish is to do so without privileging one single word over against the many words–and names–Darwish gives.
