Articles Alone in the Classroom as Limit-Case: Reading the Circulation of Emotions in Education as Provocative Psychic Interruption DAVID LEWKOWICH McGill University Montreal, Quebec, Canada ABSTRACT As the boundaries of the body, the vicissitudes of psychic life, and the bonds of social existence can hardly themselves be regarded as straightforward facts, the everyday movements of teaching and learning likewise defy and resist understand- ing. There is always that which interferes, that which makes of education a problem of affect and human relation, rather than one of simple correspondence. Though we might wish it otherwise, “learning” is often not a matter of moving from igno- rance to enlightenment, but something that proceeds instead through sometimes- unruly gaps and detours. In this article, I use a particular pedagogical limit-case, taken from Elizabeth Hay’s (2011) Alone in the Classroom, as a framing device for provoking a discussion on the emotional and psychic dynamics of teaching and learning. In the short episode that I look at from this novel, we are presented with the portrait of a young teacher who violently and gratuitously disciplines one of her students. In considering the place of emotion and affect in psychoanalytically oriented pedagogical discourse, and allowing that what we exclude necessarily returns in distorted form, I look at the potential uses of emotions as productive obstacles to learning, the presence of love and hate in the classroom, and the ways that moments of crises can sometimes allow for a creative reimagining of the world that we inhabit. More shocking is to interpret education through the wish for satisfaction stretched to the point of its underside: guilt and the need to be punished. (Britzman, 2011, p. 58) In her archival reenactment of the “weird abundance” characterizing American poet Anne Sexton’s pedagogic personae, Paula Salvio (2007) © 2012 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Curriculum Inquiry 42:4 (2012) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/j.1467-873X.2012.00605.x