The Season of Thought

One of the most perspicuous philosophical treatments of the theme of childhood is found in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. That this is the case is widely underappreciated, despite the fact that the word ‘child’ appears in the titles of two of his books: The Postmodern Explained to Children, and Lectures d’enfance, which we could translate, a little slyly, as Infantile Readings, as well as the more direct Readings of Childhood.

Both titles are remarkable in their way, conveying or implying Lyotard's main contention – that rather than being a biological stage or developmental moment, childhood is ‘the season of thought’ (1992: 101) and therefore constitutes a privileged topos and orientation for philosophy. Lyotard's infancy is

This interest in childhood is of a piece with Lyotard's broader ambit as a thinker – to affirm the event as what is in excess of all forms of conscious, representational and socio-political capture. Not only, then, is infancy an event that will come to haunt the adult, the event itself constitutes the permanent infancy of the world. The ‘infancy of the event’ (Lyotard 1992: 90) ineluctably accompanies every relatively stabilised and normalised reality, leaving them always open to transformation. This is particularly the case for the nexus of rationality and representation, and the Western philosophical tradition that rests on their intersection. The event of infancy (a near pleonasm, as I have just said) ceaselessly troubles the capacity for rational thought to grasp (begreifen, saisir), represent, the totality of what is. Rational totality, and with it comprehensive representation, is the very real figment of an act of totalising, one that covers over the infancy of states of the world at the level of reason and knowledge without quite being able to evict it in reality.