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Failed pedagogy

“Whenever I want my cat to look at something instructive — a full moon, say, or a photograph of herself — a predictable choreography ensues. I point at the thing I want her to look at, and she, roused to curiosity, fixes her attention on the tip of my extended index finger and begins to explore it with delicate sniffs.

Every time this scene of failed pedagogy gets enacted (and it’s frequent, because I am no better at learning not to point than my cat is at learning not to sniff) the two of us are caught in a pedagogical problematic that has fascinated teachers of Buddhism since Sakamuni. In fact, its technical name in Buddhist writing is ‘pointing at the moon,’ and it opens up a range of issues about both language and the nonlinguistic that became engaging to Western teachers and learners only in the twentieth century.”

Eve Sedgewick: Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003.