Abstract
Žižek warns us that that we become enslaved to particular ideas and beliefs which implicate our inner-most unconscious desires and drives. Dialectically, being ‘critical’ about these ideas can work as an insidious way for such ideas to tighten their grip. So what can teachers and students do to bring about something else? Can we escape enslavery? For Žižek, we cannot escape the very Symbolic which guides us in knowing how to act in practice, and which manifests throughout vast educational and broader regulatory systems. So whatcan we do? This, Žižek points out, is our task rather than his, and refuses to provide specific actions for us—and is this not fully aligned to a slippery ‘hag fish’ pedagogy where we have to find the answers? Crucially, Žižek raises the urgency of a need to act, and gives us glimpses into directions that we might consider. Educational researchers have taken Žižek’s inspiration and call to action, and have documented how they have constructed alternative actions in practice. Their interpretations have involved attempting to draw from different zones of the Symbolic realm, and patiently considering how such activity appears to be implicating themselves and others in their educational practices. Yet these are never definitive, victory narratives, as Žižek reminds us of Lacan’s famous statement “les non-dupes errent”: only those who think they have not been duped have already been duped. Such attempts do act, however, as beacons towards producing different understandings of education, and therefore hold the potential for change.
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Wall, T., Perrin, D. (2015). Now What Might We Do?. In: Slavoj Žižek. SpringerBriefs in Education(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21242-5_6
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