Conclusion

Pedagogy, the performative, and abjection tied to a reconsideration of bodies and spaces are concerns which haunt this book. In recent months I have been trying to articulate a theory of stammering pedagogy, drawing on Deleuze's work, and attempting to find ways of expressing the alertness to differences within which my teaching has functioned over the last three decades. A stammering and unsettling pedagogy may well be the only ethical possibility for a serial immigrant critic and teacher such as myself. I have over the decades attempted to locate a home within language (which language and within it what kind of register?), a language which is not one's first language complicated further by having to fashion it into a pedagogical tool and having to do this in a displaced context, that is, one in which one did not ‘grow up’ like a tendril or vine clinging to the certainties of particular social and physical structures. Yet in a different sense, language remains the most portable of accessories, one which has carved out a corporeal space; and when there are several languages the body sometimes transits from one to the other less than gracefully. ¹ None the less languages, with their inflections and rhythms, as much as their overt signification, invariably function to remind one of home in palpable ways. It is the meanings we first encounter in a specific language that structure our later lives psychically and physically and at the same time provide a prophylactic against the universalist claims of other linguistic meaning structures. Displaced from home, we are thus unable to feel at home because we are too aware of the alternative and parallel worlds we could be inhabiting equally well.