ABSTRACT
Manya Steinkoler presents a pedagogy inspired by psychoanalysis in “Teaching Degree Zero.” She argues that by connecting psychoanalysis and literature, one will invite students to develop a subjective engagement with texts. An organizer of conferences dedicated to pedagogy in community colleges, Steinkoler explains what one can gain by teaching “impossible” texts. Difficult modernist texts like those of Kafka, abstract meditations on literature provided by Barthes or Maurice Blanchot can be taught in community colleges. Starting from Barthes’s notion of a “writing degree zero,” linking this concept with Lacan’s meditations on a divided subjectivity that starts counting at zero before moving to S1 (the main unconscious signifier) and finding objects of desire counted as S2, S3, etc., Steinkoler teaches literature within a psychoanalytic framework. If there is resistance, it calls up Freud’s remark in “Psychoanalysis Terminable and Interminable” where he equates the impossible work of psychoanalysis, the impossible work of teaching or pedagogy, and the impossible work of government. Post-Lacanian pedagogy ushers in a new “impossible” strategy predicated on the openness to the Other.
