How does teaching veer? In what ways can we tell if a literature lesson veers constructively or otherwise? How do we determine its limits and the correlations between success or failure in our teaching when — individually or collectively — we veer in a novel, a short story or a poem? If veering, as Nicholas Royle argues, can offer us a more dynamic critical vocabulary for reading literary works by developing singular responses to risk, failure, uncertainty and difficulty, then surely (...) it can also be a profitable way to determine the peripheries of pedagogical practice, what we can and cannot expect from the experience of education. Using the example of the short story ‘Powder’ by Tobias Wolff, and the responses from a given class in the specific context of reading this story, this article examines moments of veering and the difficulties of responding responsibly to the vicissitudes of what I will call moments of unlearning. The questions are, can we veer from theories of literature to theories of teaching? Have critique and difficulty (critique as an experience and practice of difficulty) run aground in our current context? Is it time, consequently, to veer away from difficulty as the purpose of teaching and learning? And if so, what would that veering look like as a practical pedagogical action? (shrink)

In early modern theories of ‘proper’ style, ambiguously, difficulty could convey a sense of excellence on one hand (of national belonging, imperial ambition or manly ‘virility’) while also being deployed to denigrate unseemly (too feminine or foreign) speech. Difficulty erupts precisely in the points of friction: when boundaries around ablebodymindedness are drawn or when the available forms of expression are insufficient. Instead of eradicating difficulty altogether, I sift through early modern French, English and Italian writing on rhetoric to make a (...) case for paying closer attention to difficulty, lingering with it, and seeing what these friction points ultimately reveal. The contemporary concept of ‘disability gain’ posits disability not as a defect to be remedied, erased or cured, but rather as a mode of being in the world that allows for innovation, creativity and even added affects, resources or alternative epistemologies. Instead of considering, in the pedagogical domain, how to construct conceptual ‘on-ramps’ for simplifying difficulty, what would we gain by leaning into the unclear, uncertain and potentially joyful ‘other’ forms of communication itself, such as dysfluency, stuttering or Remi Yergeau’s concept of the rhizomatic neuroqueer? (shrink)

This article analyses how difficulties are used as learning tools in the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education (FM), drawing on Moshe Feldenkrais’s theory and teachings, my experience as a practitioner since 2007 and my use of FM in postgraduate academic teaching. Performer training, particularly Eugenio Barba’s work, offers a wider context of embodied practice. FM challenges the parameters of difficulty, framing it as inherently productive. Key difficulties used productively in FM are the non-habitual, constraints, differentiation, diffuse attention and disorientation. To (...) demonstrate the connection between physical and intellectual difficulties, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological approach to orientation and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s argument for the ‘primacy of movement’. I offer new ways of thinking about difficulty as emergent rather than intrinsic, expanding outwards from clearly embodied practices towards intellectual ones. To anchor this, I refer to an experiment in Israel aiming to integrate ‘organic’ and ‘scholastic’ learning through FM. (shrink)

This article explores the links between the philosophies of Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon. It highlights their shared emphasis on the difficult character of human life, framing this difficulty in terms of an existential encounter with problems and their resolutions. It shows how the notion of ‘problem’ which grounds both of their thinking presupposes a neo-vitalist conception of life as purposive behaviour, extended to forms of collective, technical and symbolic activity. The consequences of this conception for Canguilhem's and Simondon's engagement (...) with questions of pedagogy, and the role of philosophical education in particular, are then examined. The article concludes by considering the ambiguous place of anxiety in their work and its significance for thinking about the conditions of knowledge and action. Following Canguilhem and Simondon, I argue for the importance of helping the human organism develop relatively autonomous interior and exterior milieus to cope with life's fundamental difficulty. (shrink)

This article argues for a redefinition of difficulty in relation to the inextricable violence of modernity and examines the consecutive challenge to notions of understanding and interpretation — of a text, of language or of the other — that this repositioning brings. To this end, the article offers a nuanced rereading of Steiner’s canonical fourfold categorization of difficulty, in dialogue with, first, Édouard Glissant’s opacity and, second, Jonathan Pugh and David Chandler’s theorizations of ‘abyssal thought’, an approach emerging from Caribbean (...) and critical Black studies, exploring the key challenge it poses to forging an unmasterful, after Julietta Singh, comparative literary practice. With an equal attention to the theoretical and pedagogical dimensions of reading difficulty, the article emphasizes the importance of the accretive and embodied nature of the reading process and offers a repositioning of textual difficulty, as a meeting site of opacities, and a reformulation of a difficult, unmasterful reading practice, after catastrophe and with others. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan was a notoriously difficult and idiosyncratic thinker. But is there any value in his hermetically difficult style? By highlighting certain crucial elements of his practice, I show how Lacan enlists the notion of difficulty to press home that he did not want his readers to understand directly. Instead, as Foucault and Althusser explain so well, Lacan wished for his readers and auditors to discover themselves as subjects of desire through reading him. Indeed, in miming the language of the (...) unconscious, Lacan believed he could throw into sharp relief the notion of the unconscious itself and, paradoxically, better express himself. This temporary detour through misunderstanding indicates the programmatic value of difficulty itself. By commenting on the comedic aspect of Lacan's difficult literary dandyism, I also seek to playfully remind the reader that Lacan was a master of comedy and irony and that it is only by adopting a comparative literary approach to his work that we can appreciate how his theory of misunderstanding is at the heart of his conceptualization of madness and psychosis, allowing us to see how, for Lacan, the subject is ontologically sick. (shrink)