There is no Wisstrieb

Emancipation and Institutionalization from Jacques Rancière to Slavoj Žižek

Abstract

The present text investigates the consequences of the psychoanalytical uncoupling of knowledge and the satisfaction which drives our desire to know. Admitting the hypothesis
put forth by Freud and Lacan that our satisfaction in learning does not come from what we learn, how else can we conceive the very backbone of the educational process? Focusing on
what we call the »critical approach« to education, exemplified here specially by Jacques Rancière’s »return to Jacotot«, we examine the symptomal limits of a critical orientation which maintains an opposition between the emancipatory potential which can be derived from the disjunction between teacher and student and the institutional force which seeks to place the two in a stable relation. With the difficulties of teaching the exact sciences, the symptom of this critical approach appears.