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101 5 On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood lyOTARd, KId-TESTEd From Socrates’ predatory urges to Locke’s invention of the “Ideot” or Hegel’s racist assignments—for the moment I shall take this no further—philosophy has demonstrated a need to impound those who could not speak for themselves, who had not reached a certain legislated majority. Under the reign of Locke, Hume, and Condillac, empirical philosophy assembled the figure of the idiot in order to put some reality behind established hypothetical assumptions.1 The idiot pinned down the first folds of language in the essays on human understanding. Made to stand for an epoch, lost to civilization, of originary memory, the idiot spanned the chasm between nature and culture. His entry on philosophical pages helped, moreover, to rehabilitate the “empirical” basis of empiricism. Much can be said about the induction of wild children, savages, idiots, and infants into the realm of philosophical speculation, and it would be important to investigate more fully the peculiar yet crucial status of these minorities as philosophy conducts its adult raids. No doubt Nietzsche may be seen to have turned this state of affairs on its head when he invited the animals to participate in a new tropology. Now comes Jean-François Lyotard, who talks to children. No matter how polymorphously perverse, punctually pampered, or pacified, these are the distressed among us, the fearful and hungry. They squeak and peek and try to get their meaning across. They panic, then smile and burble, then panic. Held in abusive custody by the laws of becoming, they hang on to your finger for dear life. From the get-go, the reality principle sneaks up on them to snap them out of the domain of the pleasure principle (of course this is a complicated relay, as Lacan has shown, for the reality principle is always in defeat; but still, it goes after you). As in Goethe’s ballad, the Erlking is out to get them, poised to snatch the child from the arms of momentary reassurance. In the case presented by Lyotard we are faced with the figure of the minor, often oppressed, for whom language and representation may not be entirely foreclosed, though 102 surrender, the predominance of muteness, and a repertoire of stammers often govern the thwarted scene of childhood. Still, there are reprieves and the event of memory; language, however jumbled, mimetic, deregulated, occurs and belongs to the existence to which childhood—something that eventually goes into remission but returns in waves throughout the lives of the wounded—is fitted. Interiority does not necessarily take hold at the early stages. Yet even when these children are silenced or a hand is laid on them, they are traversed by what Lyotard understands as sheer feeling—maybe a pinch of joy, a sting of melancholic regret, a straitening that cuts both ways, a body memory that trembles. With no language of interiority to vouch for feeling, the children are more or less stranded, bared to colonializing projection. Vaulted and shut, their subjectivity—if there is one—offers little in the way of an account; even so, in most cases they surpass or at least scramble the master codes of philosophical claims made on their behalf and elude the cognitive scanners that try to detect and classify them. The child constitutes a security risk for the house of philosophy. It crawls in, setting off a lot of noise. The figure of the child, which in the end inserts an imaginary lesion in philosophy—a condition that calls out for endless symbolic repair—may be borne by the anguish of the différend. That is to say it enters, or is entered, into the places where speech falters and language chokes in the throat of a political body, where the question of fair representation is peremptorily dismissed or simply not addressed. But it is not as if the child had the means of representation at hand. The child is given over to extreme forms of defenselessness: dependency, Lyotard indicates, is too weak a word to describe the condition of such minority-being, the ever haunting condition of childhood. How did they stumble into philosophical headquarters? Well, their prototype, the essential child—the idiot—appeared alongside or at the head of the train of blind, deaf, or mute subjects (whose implications for subjecthood, precisely, provoked crisis) and was most closely leagued with the prestige accorded to the construction of the wild child—the teachable idiot. They were...

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