Covering the Wound: Education and the Work of Mourning

In this essay, Soyoung Lee explores the theme of mourning as a way of attending to a fundamental aspect of human experience that is bound to negativity. The essay helps readers to see that experience in a different light by drawing on what is shown to be an internal connection between mourning and having language. The dominant culture of contemporary education is preoccupied with management and control, and this renders hollow the understanding of the negative experience children go through. Such experience, if it is acknowledged at all, is regarded as requiring intervention and perhaps correction. Yet negative experience, as Lee tries to show, is the very source of personal growth. This is to take human experience as wounded, and the wound as the very place for the creation of our own words. A hasty approach toward an individual's suffering, whether in the name of "healing" or "knowledge," becomes a suppression of voice. In its denial of the otherness within the self, it neglects the possibilities of self-transformation. The essay pursues these ideas through a reading of contrasting works of art: some poetry by Paul Celan (in conjunction with Jacques Derrida's response to it) and "Still Walking," a film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both artworks deal with their own wounds and words in ways that are instructive.