°meme: passion quilt
Michael Christie, of Eurhythmania, passes on the passion quilt baton. This being: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.” Link back to the blog entry which tagged you. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.
In Excess of Measure
passionate: c.1450, “angry, emotional,” from M.L. passionatus “affected with passion,” from L. passio (gen. passionis) “passion”. Specific sense of “amorous” is attested from 1589.
passion: c.1175, “sufferings of Christ on the Cross,” from O.Fr. passion, from L.L. passionem (nom. passio) “suffering, enduring,” from stem of L. pati “to suffer, endure,” from PIE base *pei- “to hurt” (cf. Skt. pijati “reviles, scorns,” Gk. pema “suffering, misery, woe,” O.E. feond “enemy, devil,” Goth. faian “to blame”). Sense extended to sufferings of martyrs, and suffering generally, by 1225; meaning “strong emotion, desire” is attested from c.1374, from L.L. use of passio to render Gk. pathos. Replaced O.E. þolung (used in glosses to render L. passio), lit. “suffering,” from þolian (v.) “to endure.” Sense of “sexual love” first attested 1588; that of “strong liking, enthusiasm, predilection” is from 1638.
The above still is from Mademoiselle (1966), scripted by Jean Genet and Marguerite Duras.
From the synopsis:
In 1951, French writer Jean Genet presented a screenplay called “Les Rêves Interdits/L’Autre Versant du Rêve” to actress Anouk Aimée as a wedding gift. He then proceeded to sell the rights three times without telling her. Eventually the script was reworked by Marguerite Duras and filmed by […] Tony Richardson as Mademoiselle, with Jeanne Moreau in the title role. In its final form, Mademoiselle tells the story of a repressed schoolteacher who visits a veritable plague of deliberate “accidents” on the people of her rural French village. She sets fires, poisons animals, and causes floods - all in a fit of thwarted passion for an immigrant woodcutter.
Passion cannot be imparted, but it can be let loose. It is about sparking. Setting fires, causing floods. It is a tempest that, at times, partakes in the rigorous pleasures of grammar, etymology, instruction, word and concept, or the collected works and the footnote. At other moments it turns around the unpredictable trajectory of a thought, swerving off detail, sensation, reference or enigma. But, for it to be a passion and not a vocation, for it to exceed the canonical, disciplinary or just routinely dull, it will have to remain a turbulent pleasure in these sometimes apparently scholastic, but nevertheless peculiar, things. Passion, after all, can only move around the peculiar, not the (purportedly) fully-known, measurable, or seemingly normal.
I opted to stitch these two panels - passion’s etymology and that screenshot from Mademoiselle - into the passion quilt because these are the kinds of things that, for me, spark a barrage of questions. Why does the sense of passion shift from the sacrificial to the sexual around the late 1500s? Is there something beyond the senses of passion as sacrificial - which I think both presents the body but also removes it, but also which inclines toward the theological? If the removal of passion from the classroom precipitates a whole series of splits, what does the re-adherence of passion to pedagogy accomplish? More adept procedures of exploitation? Something that might exceed them? Does this move enoble the intellectual worker with a sense of suffering that compensates their proletarianisation? How to experience passion here without recourse to a sense of martyrdom, which so often unfolds as racialised, normalising, proprietal resentments against those who are improper, foreign to scholarship, proper work? Does Mademoiselle suggest a rather different trajectory for passion, as the destruction of foundations (hence, the French countryside) and their borders?
And so on.
I will tag others soon. I think I strain the definition of ‘educator’, in more ways than one - it makes me want to ask another series of questions, but also makes me fidget, which is quite possibly the same thing. So, permit me to think of others who might do the same, in their way.
Consider yourselves tagged: Eric; Dionysus (assuming it won’t contribute too much to the procrastination); Ana; M.
Theory porn?
sf [May 12, 2008 @ 12:36 pm]
eish!
I’ll need to think about this.
{**BSG spoiler alert** -a.}
[…but so long as i’m not playing GTA, i’m getting closer to work. And only ‘cause this is the place to talk about these things, and assuming you up on the latest…this last was a jarring episode, no? So much for my speculation about shaw being a possible device to reintroduce the starbuck prophesy. It does however seem the cast were pinched by being kept in the dark around the ‘introduction of a new character’ through the razor installment. So there is a good chance that the “new character” is coming back. Maybe just wishful thinking]
dionysusstoned [May 12, 2008 @ 5:17 pm]
sf - what, too much of the theory you reckon?
And, ey d, you do spring those spoilers up. I’ve not watched the most recent, and looking forward to understanding the cryptic remark …
s0metim3s [May 12, 2008 @ 6:09 pm]
oh…hehe. okay, sorry about that
dionysusstoned [May 12, 2008 @ 9:26 pm]
Yeah and I didn’t take you for a Mademoisele type.
sf [May 12, 2008 @ 11:22 pm]
Ah, well, I doubt anyone would think of me as the prim schoolteacher secretly wreaking havoc. But there’s something about being on the verge of the destruction of (received) sense I find attractive, compelling in its intensity. Composed and boiling over, at the same time.
s0metim3s [May 13, 2008 @ 12:35 am]
Why thankyou. Though I could not tag on. It caught me at a very apt time, I had been “educating” all day. As may be obvious ;)
ana [May 13, 2008 @ 11:17 am]
No, thank you for teasing out the amorous and angry aspects, as well as the instrumentalisation of passion for exploitation - (and) the cleavage, if you will.
s0metim3s [May 13, 2008 @ 11:24 am]