The author advocates for teaching about varieties of ignorance with a psychoanalytic sensibility as one strategy with which to engage the emotional investments that sustain apathy and the ignorant
refusal to care in this new era of suffering and spectatorship. Ignorance, here
conceived, is complex, far from consisting only in some passive lack of
knowledge. It is understood multidimensionally, as activity, rarely innocent,
always inevitable, and entirely ineradicable; it is a powerful agent in the
maintenance of oppression, but it is also an important resource on which we can
draw to promote curiosity and less defensive encounters with difficult
knowledge and different Others. In diagnosing different forms of ignorance, we
can distinguish between the varieties that are culturally produced and
disseminated for profit from those forms which might serve as impetus for
investigation