Presence, Performance and Critical Pleasure: Play and Prerequisites in Research and Teaching

Abstract

As will be seen from what follows, my teaching and research have been shaped by French and North American academic practices which readers will no doubt find familiar. They developed gradually, untroubled by educational theories or teaching methodologies, in the course of my experiences, seminars and classes at the école Normale Supérieure in Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, at the Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre, and at New York University in particular. I would listen, whether out of good manners or interest, to comments and contributions; I was sparing in my use of didactic assertions and persuasive remarks (but did not forego them); I would keep discussions going (but not eternally) while stubbornly refusing to engage in debates founded on value judgements; I encouraged original critical ideas, if only to test them out; but I would always come back to history, to rigour, to critical distance and to the need to produce a coherent view of the past that makes itself felt in the present. I shall add to these one further practice: a systematic questioning of the ideas of the majority, accompanied by a decided taste for diversions from the well-trodden highways of scholarship, taking an interest in whatever deviates, in the heterodox, in whatever is, or makes one, curious. It is here, in working with alternative corpuses, in asking the questions which have escaped mainstream research, but also in the pleasure of and need for discovery and shared engagement, that the interest of teaching lies.