"There is a certain pederasty implicit in pedagogy. A greater man penetrates a lesser man with his knowledge. The homosexuality means that both are measurable by the same standards, by which measure one is greater than the other. Irigaray uncovers a sublimated male homosexuality structuring all our institutions: pedagogy, marriage, commerce, even Freud's theory of so-called heterosexuality. Those structures necessarily exclude women, but are unquestioned because sublimated-raised from suspect homosexuality to secure homology, to the sexually indifferent logos, science, logic.
But what of Irigaray's phrase: 'I don't know how to conduct here some renversement of the pedagogic relaton' [sic]? Again she is admitting, from the position of supposed knowledge, her inadequacy - 'I don't know.' That already is a reversal of the pedagogic relation. The teacher 'knows', the student does not. But what Irigaray does not know is how to reverse the relation, how to get out of the position of authority. Her lack of knowledge is specifically her inability to speak her lack of knowledge, her inability to make a non-phallic representation. Of course there is also the sense that a woman in the role of authority is already a reversal. But she cannot carry off that reversal, cannot profess about women, cannot 'simply' theorize 'Renversement' means both ,reversal' and 'overthrow'. The pedagogic relation ought to be overthrown, but this subversion tends to be a reversal, which would bring us back to the same. If men and women, teachers and students switched places, there would still be an economy of symmetry, in which the knowledge of the one, the theory of the one, was the gauge for measuring the worth of the other, still no dialogue between two different sexes, knowledges, only a homologue with one side lacking what the other has." ---------
I just love it when they talk dirty like that.
Chuck Grimes