Jan Hartman
Libidinal energy and academic morality 61 Summary: This quite untypical and only half formal text pretends to apply analysis in all too perversive way. Namely it applies it ironically (however, not seriously ironically…) to the field from which it originates and where it grows-the academic filed. Since analysis is always scandalous (and cannot give up this scandal, unless it wants to remain relevant), also its travestation must use critical measures. If it is remembered, that the analysis constitutes a form of self-therapy for the academia, its honest self-application must relate to the professor-student relations. The academic social space is an area of the most direct sublimation of drives into a cultural meaning, since discursive fertility is an activity proper to members of this community. As we already know, incestuous libido is the main drive undergoing transformation and put to use there. Since the student's submission to the power of the lecturer-parent ends sometime in the future, she becomes a legal object, in addition retaining some of the attractiveness of the biological offspring. The pleasure resulting from the imaginary state of being free from the incestuous taboo is both a basis of the academic bond, and an award uniting this community. It is reflected in the essential rule of academic morality providing that female students are inviolable, but after their graduation from the university close relations with them become legal. |
