commonplace

"Yes, one will have to talk about the caress, which cannot be reduced to simple contact, be it contact with the other, nor to any of the other experiences that have been evoked, before and after "stroking." The caress gives or takes. And/or it gives and takes. In giving it takes; it gives to take; it takes up giving-what one calls pleasure a little hastily. In pleasure, the caress besieges us, it invests us with a nontheoretical and besetting question, with a worry constitutive of pleasure itself: "What is this pleasure? What is that? Where does it come from? From the other or from me? Am I taking it? Am I giving it? Is it the other who gives it to me? Or takes it from me? The time of this pleasure-is it that I am giving it myself?" And so forth. And if all these hypotheses were not contradictory or incompatible, how would one need to think them? Declare them? Even confess them? Confessing them and touching them as the stakes of touch itself, as if the grammar of the response to acknowledged gratitude ("Thank you for what you give me") remained undecidable ("But no, I'm not giving you anything, I'm giving myself . . ."

"We are very far from the world that we on the left would like to live in, the world in which simply living is possible for everyone, and building that world demands difficult work. But it also demands thought, and perhaps we can carve out a little bit of time to think and rehearse for a world in which we can all be more human. If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side."

"For Freire and for anyone who teaches great books, what is shared, our humanity, is the most important part of education. And in Freire’s account, it is precisely what structures of oppression seek to cancel out: “The solution of this contradiction between oppressor and oppressed is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.” It is not enough to recognize this fact theoretically: we reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us—what is most uniquely our own—is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity."

"One teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves. We on the left generally agree that education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever. We are sometimes embarrassed to say this, I think, out of misplaced or excessive courtesy: we have seen too many snobs tell people what they ought to like. But we shouldn’t be. It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new—it is a gift."