How Anna Likes It (continued)

But this is too pat. My failure is recent, but my kink is old: my desire to mix pedagogy and spanking (it’s difficult for me to understand now how these can be separate for anyone) predates the late, contingent development of my failure. And my desire for a spanking at the hands of a teacher can’t be limited to some concept of a therapeutic working-through of a narcissistic wound received as late as grad school. What is traumatic in schooling, and what I long to repeat (what longs to repeat itself), is this: in school you come under The Law. Even for those who are successful at it, school is a trauma. As Werner Hamacher writes: “We learn while sleeping. No one notices while he learns, only later, that he has learned. When it is too late to prevent it. Even when it comes easily, all learning is traumatic.”

The other text that would be apposite here is Kafka's “Report to an Academy.” But this is all getting a bit too gloomy.

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