By way of infancy, an exercise in translation

ABSTRACT

This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding of infancy, no longer as something that passes but as infantia. The Latin word infantia, which is not easy to translate, means a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, and also infancy, babyhood, and dumbness. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s works on the untranslatables, I propose to translate infantia, starting by not-understanding, and then by taking detours by different texts, in-between languages. Exercising translation allows us to expose ourselves to the differences between languages. The exercise in translation that unfolds will help to challenge some familiar distinctions such as infant/adult and uneducated/educated.

KEYWORDS:

• Infantia
• infancy
• translation
• untranslatables
• Barbara Cassin

Introduction

We tend to think of infancy as an age, or in experts’ vocabulary, as one or more development stages. Either way, we tend to think that the passage from infancy to childhood is just that – a passage from one age to another. What if infancy were not only an age? Augustine evoked his own infancy in a more aporetic tone in his Confessions: ‘So here we are: my babyhood [infantia] died long ago, but I myself am still alive’ (2017, I, 9; in Sarah Ruden’s translation from Latin to English). The decision to translate infantia as ‘babyhood’ hints at the rich meanings of the Latin word infantia. Infantia can also mean a lack of speech, a lack of eloquence, as well as infancy, babyhood, and dumbness.

This paper invites us to reconsider our usual understanding infancy. It is an attempt to understand infancy not as something that passes over time (an age or a temporary stage) but in broader terms. To do so, issues of translatability need to be addressed. Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s works on the ‘untranslatables,’ I propose to translate infantia by moving in the gap ‘between languages’ (Cassin 2016a, 2016b). This way of translating infantia starts in ‘non-understanding’ (Schleiermacher 1998). One could say that this exercise in translation is a sort of exercise in thought in tongues. It is an ‘exercise in/of thought’ during which one ‘puts oneself to “the test of contemporary reality”’ (Masschelein 2011, 361; see also Todd 2011; Arendt 2006) – with an added emphasis on the difference between languages. In the first part of the paper, I outline how translation can be exercised as a way of thinking. The second part is an attempt to translate infantia, departing from three intriguing questions that Augustine asked in his Confessions. Taken seriously, his questions force us to reconsider our understanding of infancy, no longer as an age that passes but as infantia.

This paper tangentially picks up discussions in the literature on infancy and infantia, infanzia, infância, etc. (see, for example, Agamben’s influential work, 1993; see also Ramaekers and Vlieghe 2014; Kohan 2015; Jasinski and Lewis 2016), but is – as will become clear – perhaps closer in its approach to ongoing conversations on enfance held in a French-speaking context (see for example Lyotard 1991; see also Sévérac 2021; Delecroix 2022). My hope is that this exercise in translation can shed light on some elementary educational issues in an indirect way: by taking ‘detours’ between texts and between languages, inspired by Klaus Mollenhauer’s thoughts on the value of detours [Umwege] (1986). Indirectly, this exercise can raise questions on the experience of having been brought up, and educated by, an older generation (departing from one’s infancy?) and on the grownups’ efforts to educate the younger generations (leading them out of infancy?).

To translate, or to move between languages

In the Dictionary of the untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin 2014b), translation is exercised as a research practice, that is, a way of reading, writing, and thinking, not only in concepts but ‘with words,’ not only in one language but ‘between languages’ (Cassin 2016b, 245). This way of thinking, by moving from one language to another, relies on the fact that there exists more than one language. Only when we accept that there exists a ‘plurality of languages’ can we draw attention to the differences between languages¹ (Arendt 2002, II, 15.42–3). What matters, as Hannah Arendt put it in her diary of thoughts (Denktagebuch), is first the fact that ‘there are languages,’ each with its singular ‘manner of thinking’; and second, that ‘all languages can be learned’ (2002, II, 15.42). Let me give an example of the differences and ‘correspondences’ (2002, II, 15.43) that we may hear when trying to move in the gap between languages, with a case of untranslatability.

Take the words liberty and freedom for example. In French there is only one word to say liberty and freedom: liberté. There is only one word in German as well: Freiheit. In English, on the other hand, there are two words: liberty and freedom. When we say liberté in French and Freiheit in German, we do not say the same thing. When we say liberty, we do not say the same thing as when we say freedom either. Liberty and liberté come from the Latin word liberi, which meant children who were ‘born free’² (Benveniste 2016, 261–2; see also Cassin and Raynaud 2014). To put it simply, liberi were born of parents who were free – who were not slaves (servi). Liberty, in this sense, is handed down from the older generation, from above to below. It differs from freedom, which has a different tale to tell. Freedom shares the same roots as Freiheit in German, and it seems to have first meant belonging to a ‘group of those who call one another “friends”’ (Benveniste 2016, 261). One can still hear a connection between being free (frei) and being in a group of friends (Freunde). Unlike liberty, freedom is not something one inherits, but one is free in a sense that is more ‘horizontal’ and ‘immediately political’ (Cassin 2019, 24).

In the Dictionary of the untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon³ (Cassin 2014b), one can find many untranslatable words that recur in philosophy, as for example the words liberty and freedom. The ‘untranslatables’ are not what ‘cannot be translated’ but ‘what one does not stop (not) translating’ (Cassin 2016b, 243). That is to say: what we keep on translating and what we keep on failing to translate. Concretely, the entries of the dictionary never give ‘the’ definitive translation of an untranslatable – ‘it is a pluralist and comparative work in its non-enclosing gesture’ (Cassin 2010, 18; see also2016a, 54). Each entry is an exercise in translation, an attempt to unweave a ‘knot of untranslatability’ (Cassin 2004a, xviii). But how does one translate an untranslatable? How does one exercise translation?

Let us start with what Schleiermacher calls the ‘fact of hermeneutics,’ that is, ‘non-understanding’ (Schleiermacher 1998, 227; see also Cassin 2016a, 2016b). Here is a good place to start: to misunderstand. To miss understanding. Non-understanding can be read in ‘its most general sense’ (Schleiermacher 1998, 227). In everyday life though, we dare to say I don’t understand when there seems to be something that we want to understand but fail to grasp. Starting there is different. When taking non-understanding as a starting point, we start from resisting and questioning our immediate understanding. Only then, can we try to understand a little better. Translation requires us to spend enough time ‘between languages’ to confront that which we keep on failing to understand and keep on failing to translate (Cassin 2016b, 257). The ‘untranslatables’ can be taken as an open invitation to keep on translating, to enter and stay long enough in the gap ‘between languages,’ in the translator’s ‘in-between’ (Cassin 2016b, 257). When doing so, we undertake a formative journey ‘de langue à langue,’ that is to say, from language to language, from tongue to tongue (Diagne 2022). It demands adopting a slow pace, to ‘become slow’ as Nietzsche would say (1997, Foreword, §5). To become slow enough to take the time to not understand the differences between languages, as between infantia and infancy, before trying to understand them a little better.

Infantia is a case of untranslatability: it is a word we keep on failing to translate. Indeed, as I touched upon in the introduction of this paper, there seems to be a gap between infantia and infancy. Hence the need to linger a bit longer in this gap, taking detours from one text to another, from one language to another. The following exercise in translating infantia may shed light on some of the differences and correspondences between infantia and infancy, and it is an open invitation to keep on translating infantia in other texts, in other languages. The best translation, in this respect, is not one but many (Cassin 2016a). Let us allow ourselves to be unsettled by this journey between languages, as it can lead us to reconsider the ordinary understanding of infancy as an age that is succeeded by another age. An age that passes. This journey starts by going back to, and by not understanding, three intriguing questions that Augustine once asked in his Confessions.

Infantia

There is an astonishing passage in the first book of Augustine’s Confessions (written in Latin, around 400 AD). A passage where Augustine of Hippo (who grew up in the periphery of the Roman Empire, Thagaste, in modern-day Algeria) phrases three intriguing questions on the impossible departure from, or of, infantia. Surprisingly, the three question marks in the Latin manuscript rarely appear in modern English translations.⁴ In Henry Chadwick’s translation (1992), there are none – no questions asked. In Frank J. Sheed’s translation, there is one question mark:

From infancy I came to boyhood, or rather it came to me, taking the place of infancy. Yet infancy did not go: for where was it to go to? Simply it was no longer there. (1944, I, 8)

One can still recollect Augustine’s three question marks by going back to the Latin text and by exploring other translations, as in William Watts’ translation from 1661 (in a bilingual edition, Augustine 1950). Let us attempt to hear them:

Table

nonne ab infantia huc pergens veni in pueritiam? vel potius ipsa in me venit et successit infantiae? nec discessit illa: quo enim abiit? Et tamen iam non erat.

Growing from the state of infancy, came I not into childhood? Or rather came not that into me and succeeded unto my infancy? Nor yet did my infancy depart; for whither went it? Yet now it was no more. (1950, I, 8)

Now that we hear Augustine wondering aloud, what is he wondering about? Augustine’s questions might sound foolish or absurd, at first. He senses that his childhood has somehow displaced his own infancy, or has childhood replaced his infancy? The first two questions put emphasis on Augustine’s strange sentiment, which sets the tone for the third one. The third question is on the impossible departure from, or of, infancy. Where did the infant that he once was go to? It is unclear whether Augustine’s soliloquy is a dialogue with himself or with his infant self. One thing seems certain: Augustine’s three questions suggest that he did not simply go from the age of infancy to the age of childhood. Something more troubling, more unsettling, is at play.

So far, the translations of Augustine’s words have left ‘the reader in peace’ (Schleiermacher 2004, 49). Sarah Ruden’s recent translation does the opposite. Her translation ‘leaves the writer in peace’ and ‘moves the reader’ towards Augustine’s text (Schleiermacher 2004, 49). One can catch oneself hearing a foreign language, an unfamiliar one, moving in and through modern English⁵:

Didn’t I move onward from there, from babyhood, and come to boyhood? Or rather did boyhood come into me and take over from babyhood? Babyhood didn’t leave me—what ‘away’ did it have to go to? Yet now it wasn’t there. (2017, I, 13).

Augustine does not, in this translation, simply asks where the infant that he was went to as if asking for direction in the street: what way? More hesitantly, more aporetically, he wonders: what ‘away’? Where else ‘did it have to go to’?

Not so fast – is Augustine making it up as he goes? One might object that Augustine talks about something (the departure from, or of, infantia) that no other human being seems to remember. Yet, Augustine acknowledges that he does not have any recollection of his infantia: ‘my first being and infancy which I have no memory of’ (Augustine 1944, I, 6); ‘my babyhood belongs to the darkness of my forgetting’ (Augustine 2017, I, 12). What is more, his three questions coincide with a shift in the Confessions. A shift from discussing ‘a string of things that he does not remember’ to discussing a string of things that he does remember (O’Donnell 1992, 56). The shift is marked by the moment when little Augustine learns to speak a little, which comes after the three questions on infancy. However, whether Augustine claims to remember his infancy (or not) does not really matter in the end. Either way, as long as he writes the word infantia, Augustine makes his infancy up as he writes. And in turn, so do I.

I do not read Augustine’s Confessions as confessions but as Augustine’s Fixions. Augustine’s writings are works of ‘fixion,’ spelled with x, in which the facts are fixated and fabricated anew through language (Lacan 2001, 483). Augustine’s infantia is fabricated in, and by, Augustine’s Latin tongue, and then fabricated anew through ‘operations of fixion,’ notably through translation (Cassin 2012, 23). So, the question of whether Augustine is making up his infancy, while saying that he does not remember it, is a tricky one. It comes down to asking: can one ever speak about infancy at all without telling a factual fixion? What I propose to do is to keep on going back (to acknowledge the ‘operations of fixion’ such as writing, reading, remembering, and translating) and, at other times, to go on (to keep on exercising thought on infancy).

After asking three questions on infancy, Augustine claims that he is no longer an infant, once he can speak a little, but the tale does not stop there. His three questions remain unanswered. What ‘away’ did the infant he once was go to? Did it ever leave? Augustine might have already sensed what modern philosophers and psychanalysts would later assert: infancy is not only an age.

When Augustine admits that he is no longer an infant, he does so while insisting on the different meanings of the untranslatable word infans: ‘For now I was not an infant, without speech [infans qui non farer], but a boy speaking [sed iam puer loquens eram]’ (1944, I, 8). Infans, in Latin, can be translated as infant yet it also means ‘non-speaker’ (as in Sarah Ruden’s translation, 2017, I, 13). Infans comes from the Latin verb for, fari (to speak), hence the insistence in the quote: ‘infans qui non farer,’ that is, a non-speaker who does not speak. An infant is thus a speechless creature, mute, without eloquence. It can also mean baby, the one who babbles, the one who says blah blah blah. Then, puer can mean a child, a boy, who can speak a little (elsewhere, in other texts, puer could also mean a slave). In other languages than Latin, one cannot always hear the differences between infans and puer. In French for example, there is one word to say enfance when there are at least two words in Latin. As Rousseau had noticed (in Emile, 2009 II, 77): enfance can mean both infans and puer, both infancy and childhood. In addition to the distinction between infans and puer, there is also liberi. As mentioned above, liberi does not only define infants and children in relation to their age but rather in relation to their (free) parents. Liberi were born of free parents, they were ‘of free birth,’ and thus inherited a certain form of liberty from their parents (Benveniste 2016, 264). Infantia does not seem to only relate to age either, but mainly to (a lack of) speech, reason and eloquence.

Augustine was not the first one in Ancient Rome to insist on the first meaning of infantia, of speechlessness. Seneca for example, in a text from the 1^st century, stated that ‘infans [an infant] could not reason’ while ‘puber [a youth, a grownup] possesses reason’ (1917, 118.14). Seneca seemed to exclude irrational infants from those who possess logos. As logos was sometimes translated from ancient Greek into two words in Latin: ratio et oratio, a word play that can mean reason and discourse (Cassin 2016b, 244). Other Roman rhetoricians and philosophers opposed eloquence to infantia, often with a preference for speakers who are eloquent (who speak well, who speak out) over those who, independently of their age, are in infancy. As when Quintilian blamed a consul of the Roman Empire, Piso, for his lack of eloquence, he blamed him for his ‘infantiae in dicendo,’ his ‘utter incapacity as a speaker,’ that is, for his infancy in speech (1922, V, 13.38). Also, Fronto, in a letter from the 2^nd century, makes the distinction between eloquence and infantia even clearer. In Fronto’s words: ‘if a choice must be made you would far and far prefer eloquence to dumbness [eloquentiam infantiae praeferas]’ (1929, 62–3). Eloquence is preferable, says Fronto, to infantiae, to the lack of eloquence, to being dumb. To sum up, in Augustine’s Confessions and in some Roman rhetoricians’ and philosophers’ discourses, infantia was not only defined as an age but also as a lack: a lack of speech, a lack of reason, a lack of eloquence.

Augustine phrased three questions on infantia to which François Lyotard would later give a radical answer: ‘Infancy has no age [L’enfance n’a pas d’âge]’⁶ (1991, 9). Perhaps running out of words in French, Lyotard returned to the Latin word infantia. Lyotard’s infantia is ‘not an age but something that does not pass’ and that does not leave the adult. It corresponds to unconscious stuff lingering outside of ‘logos’ that keeps eluding and ‘haunting’ us (Lyotard 1991, 9; see also Sarikartal 2020). One might experience it when getting lost between two sentences; in a slip of the tongue (in Latin, lapsus linguae); and when one says, in English, that it’s on the tip of my tongue. This strange feeling of not being able to continue a sentence that one has started, the sentiment of knowing what to say though without having the possibility of getting the words out. They are moments of infantia. One can object that Lyotard does not talk about infancy any longer. Indeed, Lyotard (1991) is not concerned with infancy as an age, as much as with infantia, being speechless. That is precisely why Lyotard’s infantia is so bizarre and so thought-provoking.

When infancy is not only an age, infantia can trouble some of the usual notions of formation and education, as for example any clear-cut distinction between generations. If we do not really depart from infantia, then some common distinctions are bound to falter, as the distinction between we (adults, grownups, older generations) and they (infants, children, younger generations). Infantia cannot be tamed by the usual distinctions: infants/adults, uneducated/educated. It troubles the border between the ‘barbarians outside the gates’ and educators who try to initiate and lead the barbarians ‘inside the gate of the citadel’ (Peters 1964, 107). In short, those moments of infantia suggest that we, adults, still find ourselves caught in, or by, infancy at times.

In Augustine’s questions and Lyotard’s writings, infancy evokes a strange sentiment. It evokes das Unheimliche. This hardly translatable German word has become a common one since Sigmund Freud’s essay, Das Unheimliche, in 1919 (Freud 2003). It is usually translated as uncanny in English. Unlike uncanny, in das Unheimliche there is heimlich (see Cassin 2014a), which can mean familiar, as being in a familiar place, being at home. At the same time, heimlich can also mean something that likes to hide, something kept secret. Das Unheimliche is a strange feeling that one may experience when not recognizing something that once was familiar – ‘something repressed which recurs’ (Freud 2003, 12). One can hear this troubling recurrence in Augustine’s and Lyotard’s texts on infantia. Thus, infantia is a little ghost who likes to hide in language, as a familiar yet repressed memory that haunts the adult’s home. Infantia is also a little barbarian: this moment when the tongue slips, when one is not at home in a familiar language.

This exercise in translation ends with two openings: infancy in retrospect and by way of infancy.

Infancy in retrospect

Allow me to take a detour to the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This detour can be helpful to reconsider how we seem to lose sight of infancy as soon as we look for it, and as soon as we say its name. As Ovid tells the myth in the The Metamorphoses (around 8 AD): Orpheus’ wife, Eurydice, dies after their marriage. She was bitten by a snake and died from its venom. Orpheus, with his lyre, goes to the shores of the underworld to lament their fate. He implores the gods and the guards of the underworld to allow him to be reunited with Eurydice, arguing that she passed away too soon. Orpheus’ words are so enchanting that they move those in charge of guarding the underworld to tears. Orpheus is allowed to go down to the underworld (a katabasis) to then lead Eurydice back to the living. Under one condition: if Orpheus turns back to look, Eurydice will die (again, and for good this time). Then:

[…] Orpheus, afraid

that she would fail him, and desiring

a glimpse of his beloved, turned to look:

at once she slipped back to the underworld,

and he, because he wanted to embrace her,

or be embraced by her, stretched out his arms –

but seized on nothing. (Ovid 2005, X. 75–81)

Eurydice is then called back to her fate. She slips back. While, in Ovid’s words, Orpheus turns out of desire, of love and of fear, Virgil’s version of the myth is quite different. Written a few decades earlier than Ovid’s, in Virgil’s telling (29 BCE), Orpheus turns back in a moment of fury and madness, dementia, as he forgets, immemor, not to look back (Virgil 2006, IV).

When asking retrospective questions on infancy, we often seem to end up in Orpheus’ position: turned, curved, in retrospect, to look (-spec) back (retro-). As soon as Augustine turns back to shed light on, and speak of, his infantia, it eludes him. Not unlike Orpheus, Augustine ‘stretched out his arms – /but seized nothing.’ This Orphic position also recurs in modern texts, as in a poem from Pablo Neruda’s Book of questions (1991). There, Neruda also ends up in an orphic position when looking for infancy (‘Where is the child I was/still inside me or gone?’) and when asking a couple of verses later why and when his own infancy has passed away (‘Why did we both not die/when my childhood died? [cuando mi infancia se murió?]’) (1991, 44). In sum, as Vincent Delecroix (novelist and philosopher) states in a recent essay: ‘Infancy [L’enfance] is retrospective’ (2022, 23). Retrospective in the sense that one’s own infancy is ‘lost’ and as soon as one starts looking for one’s own infancy, ‘we end up resembling Orpheus, seeing and losing Eurydice at once, losing her because seeing her, seeing her as lost⁷’ (Delecroix 2022, 23).

In a different context, Christa Wolf also looked for memories of her infancy and childhood. She phrased the departure of, and from, her early childhood as a sort of abandonment: ‘after all, the child has been left by you,’ that is to say, ‘by the adult who emerged from it’ (Wolf 1984, 12). This quote comes from her novel Patterns of Childhood [Kindheitsmuster] that is at once a fiction and an autobiography. In order to attempt to remember and try to understand the early years of her life, she came back to the places where she grew up, visiting old (un)familiar places. What is striking about her literary project is that she did not only ask when, where, and why her infancy had gone, but also wondered who this infant might be and might have become (Wolf 1984). She did not know, at first, which pronoun to use: ‘Could she say “I” to the child she was remembering?’ (Lippitz 1986, 56).

The question is unsettling. And it is closer to Eurydice’s position, than Orpheus’, at least in Rainer Maria Rilke’s version of the myth in a poem entitled ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ (1984). There are some new twists in Rilke’s version of the myth. There is a new character, Hermes, the messenger, and Orpheus is no longer the main character of the story, Eurydice is – as in other modern rewritings, as in Margaret Atwood’s poems, ‘Orpheus (1)’ and ‘Eurydice’ (Atwood 1987). In fact, Eurydice is no longer Orpheus’ Eurydice. She seems to have undergone a sort of metamorphosis. Before Orpheus went to look for her, ‘She was already root’ (Rilke 1984, 202). When Hermes announces to Eurydice that ‘He’ turned back, ‘she grasped nothing, and said softly: Who?’ (Rilke 1984, 202; emphasis in the original). Once again, we can hear an unheimlich sensation of no longer being at home, not knowing how this metamorphosis from being an infant to no longer being an infant has occurred, of not being sure to remember who one once was, who one is.

By way of infancy

When Augustine asked three questions on infantia, he did not only ask questions on infantia but he also asked them in an aporetic tone, while he insisted on, and unfolded, the literal senses of infantia as lacking speech, reason, and eloquence. It was on the tip of Augustine’s Latin tongue: while the age of infancy may have passed, infantia, a speechlessness, is lost though not completely lost, a loss that remains. In other words, one might grow out of, and leave, the age of infancy though without ever leaving infancy. Infancy somehow lingers on and can recur now and then, which is unheimlich for Eurydice (in Rilke’s version of the myth), for Augustine, and for Lyotard. For Lyotard (1991), infantia haunts and eludes both adult speakers and language. In a nutshell, it is as if infancy were the sleep of language.⁸

Infancy, as the sleep of language, could be another way of making sense of Schleiermacher’s process of ‘non-understanding’ (1998). Non-understanding allows us to resist immediate understanding. In order to understand better a text, or to draw attention to the world, one can start by a way which is the way of not-understanding. This is what I would call understanding by way of infancy. Or, in T. S. Eliot’s words:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. […]

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not. (Eliot 1959, III, 25)

But how do we go by way of infancy? To study a text, starting by not understanding what one reads and hears, then to move in the gap between languages, as I have done in this exercise in translation, might be one possible answer (one answer among many others, to be sure). By analogy, it may remind of the experience of learning a foreign language that one has never really heard before. A language that is foreign in one’s own ears, as Augustine’s Latin may sound foreign in modern ears. Starting to understand a foreign language starts by not understanding it, by hearing it the way an infant at the gates of the citadel might listen to the adult speakers. To understand a text by way of infancy, with infant ears, with infant eyes, might be a first hesitant (mis)step towards a better understanding. Hence, I have offered this exercise in translation in order to show how taking detours by different texts, and in-between languages, can help to illuminate some central educational words and ideas, through an opening gesture of letting language sleep.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Morten Korsgaard and Tone Sævi for invaluable discussions throughout process of writing this article. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here, I cite Barbara Cassin’s translation of Hannah Arendt’s quotes; see Cassin (2016b).

2. For more thorough accounts of the untranslatable words liberty and freedom, see Benveniste (2016, 261–271), see also Cassin and Raynaud (2014).

3. The Dictionary of the Untranslatables was first published in French: Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, see Cassin (2004b).

4. For the Latin text of Augustine’s Confessions, I use the Teubner edition from 1909, edited by Pius Knöll, see Augustine (1950).

5. In her translation, Sarah Ruden also proposes another way of paragraphing the Confessions with shorter paragraphs than usual, thus translating the rhythm of the text in a different manner than the other translations cited in the present paper. That is why the section that I linger on and that tends to be referred to as the 8th section of the first book of the Confessions (I, 8) is the 13th section in Sarah Ruden’s translation (I, 13).

6. When Lyotard writes ‘L’enfance n’a pas d’âge’ I translate enfance as infancy though it also means childhood (1991, 9). In my reading, to translate it as infancy is coherent with Lyotard’s short text entitled ‘Infans’ (in Latin in the original) in which one can find this quote. For a closer reading of Lyotard’s works on childhood and infantia, see Sarikartal (2020). Sarikartal’s paper (2020) shows that the theme of ‘childhood’ is not only present in Lyotard’s Lectures d’enfance [Infancy Readings] (1991) but is rather a theme that runs through Lyotard’s works.

7. My translation.

8. I am paraphrasing Rousseau’s words: ‘l’enfance est le sommeil de la raison’ (2009, E2, 242). There, enfance tends to be translated as childhood: ‘childhood is reason’s sleep’ in Allan Bloom’s translation (2010, E2, 107).