“Forget the literal-mindedness of mastectomy, chemically induced menopause, etc.: I would warmly encourage anyone interested in the social construction of gender to find some way of spending half a year or so as a totally bald woman. As a general principle, I don’t like the idea of “applying” theoretical models to particular situations or texts—it’s always more interesting when the pressure of application goes in both directions—but all the same it’s hard not to think of this continuing experience as, among other things, an adventure in applied deconstruction.” Eve Sedgwick, Tendencies.

I invite you to explore, as I have done (http://brys.wordpress.com/), and as I venture to say that we all do, day in day out, the complexity of the enunciatory possibilities—the poeisis—of repair.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/repair

We are very familiar in the social sciences with the everyday meaning of repair. As clinicians, teachers, researchers, we fix our gaze on broken things, diagnose the cracks, anomalies and fissures and set out to set things straight. As in:

re·pair 1 (r-pâr)

1. To restore to sound condition after damage or injury; fix: repaired the broken watch.

2. To set right; remedy: repair an oversight.

3. To renew or revitalize.

4. To make up for or compensate for (a loss or wrong, for example).

By contrast with an instrumental approach to repair, in the case of this wonderful issue of Educational Insights, the Editors have asked us to immerse ourselves in the possibilities that are represented by what Eve Sedgwick has called, “an adventure in applied deconstruction.” The articulation of an active, relational notion of repair recast as Performing Repair, changes the stress entirely from one of the management of impairment, to the mobilization of capacities enacted within the constraints of the unknowable Other and the abyss of freedom.

Exploring the trusty dictionary a little further, one finds a perspective on repair that is inflected with movement, with repetition, with habitual engagement and with an open-ended understanding of temporality.

[Middle English reparen, repairen, from Old French reparer, from Latin reparre : re-, re- + parre, to prepare, put in order; see per-1 in Indo-European roots.]

re·pair 2 (r-pâr)

1. To betake oneself; go: repair to the dining room.

2. To go frequently or habitually: repairs to the restaurant every week.

n.

1. An act of going or sojourning: our annual repair to the mountains.

2. A place to which one goes frequently or habitually; a haunt.

[Middle English repairen, to return, from Old French repairier, from Late Latin repatrire, to return to one's country; see repatriate.]

A focus on the performativity of repair adds further critical layers since it suggests that one cannot take repair for granted—that it is enacted.

These are rich and wonderful ways of writing the relationality of repair into our understanding of life itself. One must be prepared always to begin again. The lack of finitude concerning absolute truths and meanings provides, Derrida argues concerning performativity, our singularity, and in so doing, binds us to the inexorable alterity of the Other in a deeply ethical bond. This is a good place for the infinite work of performing repair. Welcome.

Mary Bryson
Director
Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry