Deleuze’s children

Abstract

Children, the image of the child, and the gendered figures of the girl and the boy are thematics that run through the work of Deleuze and feature prominently in his joint writing with Guattari. However, there are many different children in Deleuze’s writings. Various child figures do distinct things in Deleuze’s work. In this article, I argue that his work on children can be utilized to rethink popular, teleological notions of childhood and ‘growing up’.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• children
• growing up

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to my peer reviewers. I value your time, energy and expertise. Thanks also to Catherine Driscoll, Meaghan Morris and Elspeth Probyn.

Notes

1. It is here that Deleuze illustrates his point with the fabulous line: ‘The yes of the child-player [Dionysus] is more profound than the holy no of the lion [Zarathustra]’ (Deleuze, 1983, p. 182).

2. Perhaps the most interesting discussion of the child in Cinema 2 occurs on page 192, in relation to the child in the cinema of Philippe Garrel. Here, Deleuze states: ‘The child is himself the problematic point. It is around him that the gest is composed, as in the episode Paris Vu Par … 20 ans après (‘Rue Fontaine’): the first attitude is that of the man in the middle of telling the story of a woman who said ‘I want a child’ and who disappeared; the second, that of the same man sitting in a woman’s house and waiting; the third, they have become lovers, attitudes and postures; the fourth, they have split up, he wants to see her again, but she tells him she had a child who died; the fifth, he learns that she has been found dead herself, and he kills himself, his body toppling slowly over in a long image to become one with snow, as in a posture which has no end. The child thus appears as the undecidable point in terms of which the attitudes of a man and a woman are distributed’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 192). Again we see the child as the figure who activates situations.

3. Meaghan Morris (1996) and Greg Siegworth’s (2003) writing on the child as a corporeal model of experimental life and subjectivity are groundbreaking texts that work with Deleuze’s Spinozist child.

4. Such embodied space is described by Rosi Braidotti as being constitutive of thought itself: ‘The exclusion [of the body] is required to validate the positivity of reason, but insofar as the exclusion is constitutive, it grounds thought in mechanisms of exclusion of the other. The other’s silence makes the subject’s speech possible’ (Braidotti, 1991, p. 55). Just as the mind needs the body in order to exist, the body of the child is required in order to perform childhood acts.

5. The family and familial relations are the spaces rhizome children must constantly work to deterritorialize: ‘the family is replaced by a community, conjugality by a regime of exchange and migration, micro-Oedipuses crop up, microfacisms lay down the law, the mother feels obliged to titillate her child, the father becomes a mummy’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 228).