Open network for dialogical practices

revolution

Peter RoberIFSW KU Leuven

Welcome to the

congress

Open network for dialogical practices

Worries and criticism about the system

• Diagnostic labeling• Too much medication• Emphasis on the brain• ….

Open network for dialogical practices

Revolution - hesitations

Look at history… which revolutions can be considered successes?

We want change,But…- The system we have may actually be the best

there is and the best there has ever been…- Where do we want to go?

Open network for dialogical practices

Utopia

• Book of Thomas More (1516)

• Utopia = an ideal society

• Attempts to describe utopias often turn out to be descriptions of dystopias

• How can we conceive of the ideal society?

Open network for dialogical practices

Clip Chomsky-Foucault

Open network for dialogical practices

Power and resistance (Foucault)

• Resist/challenge• Research/try to understand• But don’t expect to find a place outside of the

discourse – there is no liberation: Resistance does not lead to liberation, but rather to new power relationships, that must be resisted with practices of freedom.

Society as oppressive

Client

Oppression by society

Therapy-as-liberation view (e.g. narrative therapy)

Client

Oppression by society

Therapist is liberated

(speaks from a position outside of societal discourse)

Therapy

Therapy as liberating

or at least as non oppressive

The person and the constitutive society

Client

Society as constitutive

through privileging and

suppressing

Chaos, incoherence, madness, fragmentation, …

…nothing…

Socia

l disc

ourse

Inner dialogueO

uter dialogue

Dialogical therapy

Client

Therapist as

dialogical partner

Responsiveinteraction

Society as constitutive

through privileging and

suppressing

Society as constitutive

through privileging and

suppressing

Chaos, incoherence, madness, fragmentation,…

…nothing…

Chaos, incoherence, madness, fragmentation,…

…nothing…

reflection

Inner dialogueO

uter dialogue

reflection reflection reflection

Therapy

Open network for dialogical practices

Aporia (Derrida)

• Aporia - Ancient Greek: ἀπορία: impasse; puzzlement; doubt; confusion

• in Derrida’s work this concept functions to highlight the tension-filled nature of seemingly untroubled concepts like gift, hospitality, love and so on.

• For instance: hospitality as being caught between the absolute ethical imperative and the conditional laws of hospitality.

Open network for dialogical practices

Clip Derrida on the aporia of love

Open network for dialogical practices

Dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin)

As a prescriptive concept • Some language is dialogical • dialogue as an ethical ideal, as opposite of monologue

As a descriptive concept • All language is dialogical • focus on the dialogical nature of all human meaning

making• tensionality

Open network for dialogical practices

Revolution, what revolution?

• Not: a revolution resulting in a final utopia

• Rather: an unfinalizable revolution, within the tension between what is and what could be. We have to keep on fighting for a better world, while accepting that this is the best world we have and we have to make do.