Psychoanalysis, education, and dystopia: on the effects of the ways of operating in/the language

Abstract

In face of what we can name as a crisis of language that fills and erodes our social bond, in a Brazil that sees public authorities undermining the unassimilable difference that underpins the symbolic structure and organizes what we share as reality, it is urgent to direct our thought to the actual effects produced by the ways of operating the language, either in the subjectivity of the generations formed by us or in the world that we are about to bequeath to them. In this article, we try to recover elements from the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis – and the concept of language that supports them –, to articulate a critical reflection on the incidences of operations on the language – and its transmission – in the design of the world we share. Revisiting Klemperer’s work on the language of the Third Reich and George Orwell’s novel, 1984, allows the text to relate operations on the language and the memory as structuring of a social bond that excels in the production of the one-way placed at the service of a few. As a way of updating this debate, the article resumes facts from the recent Brazil that provide an image of the mechanism that the text searches to question. The work points to the urgency of watching over the inventive opening of the language to return its polysemic pulsing and indicate the poetry making as a possible guide for the teaching that looks for this restitution.