ROBERTO RIBEIRO BALDINO and TA ˆ NIA CRISTINA B CABRAL INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY FROM HEGELYLACAN POINT OF VIEW: DO WE DESIRE OUR DESIRE FOR CHANGE? ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the problem of social exclusion, reported to be intrin- sically connected to mathematical teaching, from the perspective of Hegel’s philosophy and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. It provides a characterization of mathematics from a language viewpoint discusses the perennial demand for more mathematical achieving from the perspective of hysterics and obsessive symptoms and shows how desire is linked with the choice of values in assessment. KEY WORDS: Hegel, Lacan and Zizek, inclusion and diversity, language and com- munication, mathematics education and psychoanalysis INTRODUCTION We start from the problem of no-change within change addressed to in the leading plenary paper of PME28 (Klette, 2004), and take up the Conference main theme, inclusion and diversity from a new perspective that seeks to carry into effect the theoretical rigor necessary to consider issues of Mathematics Education. This perspective consists in Lacan’s slant of psychoanalysis whose relation to Hegel’s philosophy Slavoj Zizek has recently been working out. FIntended as an agent of therapy, of formation or of investigation, psychoanalysis counts only on one resource: the patient’s talk_ (Lacan, 1966: Ch.I). Talking includes gestures, sobbing, as well as silences and the signifiers consist of spoken and written words as well as rods and structured material. So, Ftalking- cure,_ as psychoanalysis has been referred to, should have long ago been recognized as a domain akin to what we can call mathematical Ftalking- learn._ We lean heavily on Zizek (1999, 2002) from which we include many extracts not only in support of our reasoning but because we could not find any better way of expressing the ideas therein; we also hope that this strategy will stimulate mathematics educators to read this author. We characterize mathematics of the twentieth century (M-20) as a con- tinuous exclusion process of meanings from language, of which Dedekind is the best example if not the founding mark; we alert that International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education (2006) 4: 19Y43 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2005