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Peggy
Phelan Misunderstanding
"How can one create a performative
pedagogy in the West which refuses the acquisitive model of power-knowledge
operative everywhere in institutions of “higher learning”? How can
one invent a pedagogy for disappearance and loss and not for
acquisition and control? How can one teach the generative power of
misunderstanding in a way they will (almost) understand? And who
are “they” anyway?" (173)
"Pedagogy must involve training
in the patient acceptance of the perpetual failure of in/sight. The widespread
belief in the possibility of understanding has committed us, however unwittingly,
to a concomitant narrative of betrayal, disappointment, and rage.
Expecting understanding and always failing to see it, we accuse the other
of inadequacy, of blindness, of neglect. The acceleration of ethnic
and racial violence may be due in part to the misplaced desire to believe
in the (false) promise of understanding. It is perhaps past time
that we begin to attempt to see the inevitability of misunderstanding as
generative and hopeful, as opportunities for conversation ( and maybe a
little further down the line for comedy as well), rather than as a betrayal
of a promise. Or to put it slightly differently, perhaps the best
possibility for “understanding” racial, sexual, and ethnic difference lies
in the active acceptance of the inevitability of misunderstanding.
Misunderstanding
as a political and pedagogical telos can be a dangerous proposition, or
it invites the belligerent refusal to learn or move at all. This
is not what I am arguing for. It is an attempt to walk (and live)
on the rackety bridge between self and other–and not the attempt to arrive
at one side or the other– that we discover real hope." (174)
On Faking Hope
"This then in Hope, the
hope we fake and perform and the hope we thereby make and have. Hope’s
power is measured in this faking. Each performance registers how
much we want to believe what we know we see is not all we really have,
all we really are. That negation reveals the generative possibility
of the “not all” that keeps us hoping. Maybe next time I’ll love/be/loved;
maybe next time I’ll write a better book; maybe next time my I will see."
(179)
and hope tied to grief...
"legislatively, psychically,
and emotionally, we are beginning to face the uncertainty of our notion
of when and how the body lives and dies, who does and does not inhabit
it, who can and cannot speak for it when it is beyond the comforting amplifications
of metaphor. Pure symptom, sometimes the body’s Being insists on
an end to interpretative possibilities. And so sometimes the body
goes. Disappears. But the witness remains. Formerly mute objects
become articulate. The old shirt recalls the riot of color he provoked
in her face. The coffee cup with the broken handle hums a w/holy
different hymn. The performance of grief reanimates the symptoms
of his life, animate and disappearing, material and visible." (177)
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