The Weakness of Infancy

It is hard to think of childhood as anything other than an idealized time. We all know that this is not necessarily true, that very tough things can also happen during those years. But thinking that children are immune to the discomforts of adulthood is a way of preserving the belief that at some point in our lives we were completely happy. The big question in this regard is: were we really that happy? Nostalgic memories of a better past are still one of the driving forces of humanity, but this metaphysical belief leads us to forget everything good about our present, eternally doomed to be worse off than in our past. In response to this assumption, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard proposed a reinterpretation of infancy. Not childhood, but infancy. Not that stage of life we desperately want to return to, but the creative reverse of the adult condition. In contrast to the idea of childhood as something "past" and "better," infancy is presented as a new way to understand our present and our future without the metaphysics of nostalgia. In a world ruled by adults who say only what can be said, it is worth remembering that unprejudiced and innocent gestures are not something restricted to the early years—these may still help us disrupt a world that is too serious, orthodox, and predictable. The parallel publication of the books Readings in Infancy and Lyotard and Critical Practice brings these reflections back to our present. Are we thinking about the problems of the twenty-first century from a place of nostalgia? Why are we afraid to reinvent the rules that govern our society? Shouldn't we start thinking about the problems from a more complex position? If even someone as rigid and mature as Jean-Paul Sartre was willing to embrace infancy, as Lyotard explains, we may still have time ourselves.The first of these recently published books is a critical edition of a work by Lyotard that had not been distributed in English before, Lectures d'enfance, translated as Readings in Infancy. Although all the texts included in it had been previously translated, they had never been presented in English in their original book format. The editors, Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford—key thinkers in Lyotard studies—in addition to producing two fantastic introductions that give context to each of the texts included, have also homogenized six different translations to give rise to a single entity. Furthermore, Bamford is editor of Lyotard and Critical Practice, the second of the above-mentioned books, with Margret Grebowicz as coeditor, who had already edited the suggestive Gender after Lyotard (2007). If Readings in Infancy is a book that had to be reconstructed as such, Lyotard and Critical Practice is composed of critical studies on Lyotard's philosophy that are interwoven with translations of four of his texts: "The Phrase-Affect (from a Supplement to The Differend)," "The Other's Rights," "Apathy in Theory," and an interview with Lyotard conducted by Alain Pomarède. The last could have belonged to the previous book edited by Bamford, also with Bloomsbury, Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (2020). To understand what connects them, what separates them, and why it is important that they have only been published recently, we must begin with the first.The work done by Bamford and Harvey allows something beautiful to occur: to reread a book as if it were new, to write about it as if it had been released this year. The original unity of the text had brought together six writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Sartre, James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, and Paul Valéry—all this was lost owing to the publication of the translations in different journals and books. Now that the book is complete again, it is worth reflecting on what it can bring to the present. First of all, it should be noted that this is not really a book about any of these six authors, although it will be of interest to anyone who is drawn to their work. The link that binds them all is Lyotard himself, his obsessions and his interests; in this particular case, what he calls infantia or misère, but which these other writers and thinkers refer to as "indubitable" (Kafka), "inarticulable" (Sartre), "inappropriable" (Joyce), "infantile" (Freud), "disorder" (Valéry), and "birth" (Arendt). The real aim of the text seems to be to trace a constellation of concepts and characters who share the same attitude but express themselves differently. There could be other writers, such as Samuel Beckett, who is mentioned on occasion throughout the text, but the selection relates to the contingencies of Lyotard's own life, as all the texts were first commissioned as lectures and then assembled as a book. Thus the book can be read as an organized whole, if we follow the thematic indication that Lyotard outlines in the introduction and the wonderful critical studies by Robert Harvey (foreword) and Kiff Bamford (afterword), but also as a set of six texts—to do so in one way or another will depend on our interest in the figure of Lyotard. This will not affect the main question, the one that obsessed all the authors gathered here: the babbling of an artist making an anamnesis of his own infancy.In some way, the discursive core of the book is organized around the main theme of the first chapter: the return of Ulysses. This idea is shown to be the perfect explanation of what is involved in what Lyotard will call anamnesis. Joyce rewrites the Odyssey as if it had never been written, as if Ulysses had never been its protagonist, as if the biographical past of the book's characters—the death of Stephen Dedalus's mother and Leopold Bloom's son—were as inappropriable as the possibility of rewriting a book exactly like it. "And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did," Joyce himself says in the book. Return does not seem to be the most advisable option; entropy pushes us forward without respecting our desire to stay or to turn back. It will be possible to return to the same place, but that place will no longer be the same. In this sense, the worst thing you could do is to claim a memorial return to childhood. There is only one possible way out, Joyce's way: write something as if it had never been written, as if we did not know our own language, as if Ulysses had to return to Ithaca but was no longer Ulysses and Ithaca was no longer Ithaca. To go through anamnesis is nothing other than to be susceptible to the return of babbling, an open condition that calls into question the dogmatic structure of our life and our knowledge: to return to writing and speaking without knowing how to do it, free from the conditioning factors that force us to desire a return that is impossible. It is not the problem of how to return to childhood, but of infancy as a reproducible condition in the adult world.In contrast to this first chapter, which opens the reflection on the (im)possibility of return, the last chapter, dedicated to Freud, concludes the book with that which is always there even if we do not realize it: the phoné, the timbre of the voice, the matter that gives form to words and which we omit as if it were the white of the page that surrounds each word—as Lyotard has recalled on many occasions. This last text—like all of them—speaks of infancy, but also of the inarticulable, and of Joyce, Bloom, and many other things that have been mentioned throughout the book. The main idea is that the voice of the child is inhuman, like that of the beast. The difference between the two is that childhood is integrated into the polis like the noise of words, pretending to be part of a language to which it never quite belongs; in a way, Ulysses, like so many other works of art, music, and literature, is also part of that noise. And, of course, there is something very political in this noise, as there is in the babbling of the children who show us that it is possible to speak without knowing the code, that it is still possible to invent new words and new ways of questioning adult rationalism that insists on reducing everything to already defined values. Readings in Infancy shows that Lyotard is not the nostalgic we have been led to believe he is, but an advocate of complex thinking for a complex world.If the first book serves to establish the theoretical discourse and to offer us a notable repertoire of writers with whom to learn to make noise, this second text is a practical implementation of that critical perspective, that of the affective condition of infancy—never the nostalgia of childhood. The book is divided into three parts: "What Resists Thinking," with chapters by Derek R. Ford, Margaret Grebowicz and Marina Zurkow, Claire Nouvet, and Georges Van Den Abbeele; "Long Views and Distances," by John E. Drabinski, Claire Pagès, Bartosz Ku´zniarz, and Yuk Hui; and "Why Art Practice?," by Jill Gibbon, Ashley Woodward, Stephen Zepke, and Kiff Bamford. To these must be added the four texts by Lyotard himself already mentioned at the beginning of this review, which have little unity among themselves and whose sole aim is to help us continue the task of critical practice—like most of Lyotard's work. In this sense, the chaotic aspect of the book must also be understood as the only possible answer to the chaos of our own world. After all, as the editors say, this is not another book about Lyotard, but a book that replicates the same critical spirit with which Lyotard approached things.As with all collaborative books, and even more so with such a diverse set of topics, it will be up to readers to judge which texts interest them most. Many readers will come with specific interests, inspired by specific chapter titles and relatively disinterested in Lyotard and his legacy. This leads us to differentiate the texts in a different order from that proposed by the editors, separating texts that closely follow the debates around his thought and legacy from those that only use Lyotard as inspiration.In the first group, we have some authors already known to Lyotard's regular readers, such as Nouvet, Van Den Abbeele, Pagès, Hui, Woodward, and Bamford. These authors continue a discursive path that presents Lyotard as a thinker fit for the twenty-first century: Nouvet and Van Den Abbeele refer directly to the idea of infancy, Pagès and Hui use Lyotard's interventions in debates about topics such as Algeria or the Gulf War to explain how Lyotard's thought can help us think about our present, Woodward distances him from the melancholic negativity to which Jacques Rancière has condemned him, and Bamford brings Lyotard into the present through his biographical experience and performative practice.However, the most original contribution to the book is in the second group of authors. The best example of the importance of going beyond Lyotard is in the Grebowicz and Zurkow chapter on cetaceans, a text that follows the critical perspective opened up by Lyotard to question the speciesism that runs through his own thought. This text is the perfect explanation of what is involved in doing critical practice through Lyotard. Using an author's conceptual tools against his own thinking is the only way for a philosopher to survive the epistemological limits of his time, and this is what we see in many of these texts. What makes a thinker contemporary is never his conclusions, but the tools he offers to future thinkers. This can also be seen in Drabinski's chapter on the crossovers and anachronisms between Western postmodernism and Afro-postmodernism, as well as in that which Jill Gibbon devotes to her own artistic practice, specifically to a series of drawings in which she draws people attending weapons fairs. In these cases, what is shown is not a theoretical reflection on Lyotard's legacy, but a setting in motion of his critical practice.Having explained all this, the relationship between the two books is evident, since Lyotard and Critical Practice is an apocryphal sequel to Readings in Infancy. In the latter, Lyotard proposed a reading of the skeptical condition that Joyce, Kafka, and the others showed in the face of the homogenizing attempts of their time. Learning from Lyotard, from his critical legacy, the authors of Lyotard and Critical Practice propose, accompanied by four texts by Lyotard, the infancies to come. In this sense, the critical practice advocated in this book explicitly renounces the dialectical and bellicose tools that marked the wars and deaths of history in favor of other, "weaker" tools in Gianni Vattimo's sense: tools open to difference and multiplicity, tools that are more artistic, creative, and experimental. Let us celebrate the publication of these two books as a reminder that we can still invent new languages, new gestures, and new possibilities, like, for example, sneaking into a gun show to draw what's going on, like a naughty child discovering the horrors of the adult world through his innocent and affirmative playing. Let us show the administered and adultized world that, deep down, we are still open to infancy.