⁹ There are not many categories available for this role: tutor, mentor, academic adviser. We propose to use the term tutor, in that it denotes a different signification than that of a technical relational support in class (tutor of class) or of support when a student has difficulties in understanding something (cognitive tutor). It is also different from tutoring in the didactic tradition of Anglo-Saxon universities (Oxford for example, where tutoring concerns the modality of teaching a discipline - an individual relation in which the teacher proposes texts and the student answers with essays, etc.); nor is it the same as academic advising, which centers more on psychological counseling and on the problems of integration and institutional orientation of the student. These professional categories are certainly important. For a first monitoring of the function of the tutor in European universities I refer to Maria Cristina Pedicchio and Isabella Fontana (ed.), Tutoring in European Universities, Trieste, 2000. America and Western Europe, University Press of America, 1990.

¹⁰ I wish to make two remarks: 1) concerning "self" and "social": The didactic device assumes authentic expectations of individualization by releasing them from the theory of one stable "self" that is already there isolated from the political and historical context and kept away from arenas of conflict, difference and power. The "self" that is at the base of the device is one that is closely social, aborigine a self-in-relation-to-others, which not only builds itself with the available resources (experiences, languages, stories, significance), but also takes part in this constructive act of the struggle for social justice. This constructive act is a struggle for meaning because all these resources carry cleavages (as for their availability, legitimating, hierarchy controlled by dominant systems); 2) concerning "personalization" and "desire": "personalization" in the device does not mean privatization of the study. It is not a commodity, i.e. educational consumer good, that isolates the individual in the act of the own consumption; on the contrary, it is the process that both individualizes truly and as such inscribes the self in social ties. Personalization refers to the "pedagogy of desire". We need a reflection on the possible relation between the original and the originating that is characteristic of each of us and its conscious progressive recognition. We can broadly understand "desire" as the unfolding reflective awareness of creative answering to the already personal given being-in-the-world. The passage to speech act remains central, although it does not exhaust other expressive means to reach it. The character of deployment returns to an otherness that "alters" continuously, which can only be recognized through mediation and that without exhausting itself. The authentic desire always relates beyond the object to a subject. Desire then also connotes a reality that is an historical, mediated, narrative construction and is as such graspable, public, and communicable. The didactic device with its practices of desire (framework of differentiated propositions, personal answers to these propositions, the dialogical scaffolding in its various ways - tutorship, seminars, etc) is the play of mediation that wishes to promote its progressive recognition. The shared criteria of rereading permit also to recognize the direction and the authenticity (in the literal sense of autos that is the intimate adherence to the subject and its responsible appropriation).