He Fa on Badiou

Gray-white hair is brushed back, the mouth beneath fine-framed glasses seems to be speaking, and two hands open a not quite symmetrical span before the body. This empty distance interests me more than the gray knit and striped collar. The Badiou study adds hairstyle and gesture to the imitation; I want to make it a lesson that has not yet taken shape.

A gesture can help explain size, relationships and sequence, or create a feeling of clarity before the content is clear. Listeners follow the hands as though an object were already jointly held. Yet the space between them remains empty, and nodding may only show that everyone has grown familiar with the rhythm of speech. Actual understanding needs an opportunity to continue the thought by doing it another way.

White hair readily lends experience's weight to a speaker, but He Fa's face retains a little unpracticed hesitation. I want the two to interfere with one another: experience offers methods that have been tested, while hesitation reminds us that they may not suit the person here now. Long study need not retreat into silence, and repeated teaching should not confer the right to refuse new questions.

Requiring every experience to be proved anew each time would, of course, waste what has accumulated. Teaching must supply a starting point that can be trusted provisionally without turning that beginning into an endpoint. One can first explain a particular method, then offer counterexamples and conditions for change, showing learners where it can be used as is and where they must judge for themselves. Not every challenge overturns the whole lesson, and not every explanation ends the challenge.

I let the open hands pause, leaving space for the other person to put something in. The gray cuffs remain at the wrists, and the lesson can continue, but I do not want the emptiness to be filled forever by one person. Experience willing to be taken up and changed here has a real chance of living into its next use.