The Hermeneutics Of Childhood

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THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD David Kennedy The first principle of a hermeneutical approach to childhood is a recognition of the mutual necessity of the tenos "adult" and "child," Logically, the child is by definition anot-adult, and the adult a not-child. In linear time, the child is a not-yet adult, and the adult a once-was child. But the law of contradiction does not cover the adult-child economy, for as Nandy has said of what Freud taught us: "Childhood and adulthood [are] not two fixed phases of the human life-cycle (where the latter [has] to inescapably supplant the former), but a continuum which, while diachronically laid out on the plane of life history, [is] always synchronically present in each personality.,,1

child and adult, has certain universal, and certain historical and epochal configurations. As for the latter, what has recently come to be known in the West as the "invention of childhood" is also, in keeping with the principle stated above, the invention of adulthood. The modernist progress narrative of a cultural "growing up" or "coming of age," is also the story of an existential and ideological separation of child and adult. As the story goes, modem man, armed with science, threw off superstition, and in so doing, he also threw off childhood. But if child and adult are a mutually necessary, contrastive pair, he could not throw off childhood, but only repress it and project it onto an Other. Self is a conununity in which all the ep- So in attempting to eradicate the mythic or ochs of the life cycle, the future as well as the "childish" dimensions of consciousness, past-birth, childhood, youth, middle age, childhood was "invented" during the 16th old age, and death-are always present, but and 17th centuries by being isolated in chilcontinually being reinterpreted, from what- dren, then reified in age-graded institutions, ever point at which self stands. We are, as universal schooling, and new, "adult" definiWalter Misgeld has pointed out, always chil- tions of public behavior, or civilite. 3 dren to the extent we are still in the process As for the universal configurations of the of becoming adults: "being an adult, if adult-child pair, childhood was fraught with treated as a matter to be achieved again and symbolic significance for the life-cycle long again, makes us take note that we, as adults, before Western modernism-witness Lao must think of ourselves as being like children Tzu's 'infant, the child hero of myth and in order for us to be able to say that we are folktale, man's entrmce into Plato's age of adults. ,,2 Saturn as a little child, and the paidion of the So the adult-child economy is a central, Jesus sayings. 4 But the universal theme may continuously shifting balance in the ecology be said to have first entered history in the of the self, and of primary importance to any modem West, where it has played a key role model of self-construction in which our ma- in the development of ideas about selthood, turity is always in question, and never there . about the meaning of the human life cycle, as a matter of course, or fixed once and for and about human forms of knowledge. This all as an end-point. If this is the case, any special concern with childhood was only philosophy of childhood is also a philosophy made possible because of an mitial rupture: of adulthood. it was the very distanciation of adult and The relationship between the two terms, child in modernism which founded a herme-

PHlLOSOPHY TODAY 44

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neutics of childhood. For those "come of age," childhood is a once-familiar text become strange, which can only be reappropriated through dialogue. From the standpoint of hermeneutic theory, the separation is the historical equivalent of what Ricoeur caBs the "moment of distanciation in the relation of self to itself:>5 which makes possible the reappropriation which is the outcome of the dialogue between reader and text. For the hermeneutics of childhood, the moment of separation operates in two, related dimensions. It is a cultural-historical moment in the life of Western self-understanding, and a moment in the life of each individual person in the process of psychological maturation. As for the psychological moment, it is through the process ofexposing myself to the "text" of the child's form of knowledge that I experience what Ricoeur refers to as an "enlarged self." For the adult in hermeneutical relation with childhood, we can say with Ricoeur, "Appropriation is lhe process by which the revelation of new modes of being ... new forms of life ... give the subject new capacities for knowing himself. ,,6 We can assume that this hermeneutical relationship between adults and children has always existed in some form and among some people. Most parents know about "enlargement of self' through self-loss in paternity/maternity. As Levinas points out, our whole understanding of the nature of subjectivity is fundamentally altered in the experience of being a parent: Neither the categories of power nor those of knowledge describe my relation with the child.... I do not have my child; I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who while being Other ... is me, a relation of the I with a self which yet is not me. In this "I am" being is no longer Eleatic unity. In transcendence the I is not swept away, since the son is not me; and yet I am my

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As for the cultural-historical moment in Western self-understanding, it follows the rise of what might be called aduJtism-the secularism, individualism, and positivism of the modernist revolution, spearheaded by the hegemony of the Cartesian subject as a way of understanding self and world 8-resulting in the "invention of childhood," i.e., the reification of the child as a special life-form separated from adults. The dialogue with the child and childhood which emerged dialectically from this separation leads, in culture and in thought, to an "enlargement" in at least two forms: a more profound and empathetic understanding of children themselves; and a more inclusive understanding of the role of childhood in adult self-understanding, which is above all a reclamation of what Merleau-Ponty,called "a dimension of being and a type of knowledge which [adult] man forgets in his natural attitude.,,9 This, in tum, is connected with what, in the same volume, he calls "the task of our century. . . the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason." I!) Historical Perspectives: The Two Teleologies

The hermeneutics of childhood is, as has already been indicated, an originary theme in human self-understanding, found in some form across culture and through history. Its Western narrative is initiated in the West's founding text, the Bible. Both meaning poles of the relation adult-child are given in the "great code" from the start, and become, in time, two disparate developmental goals for the Western life cycle, in ambivalent coexistence. Jesus says: become like little children and you will know what I know, which is different and more important than what adults know, and which will save you. Paul says: be no more like children, who are weak, ignorant, and easily tempted by sin, but grow up into the full stature of mature, sober, manhood, We can find these two contradictory

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD 45

themes stated and developed consistently in the West. Jesus' theme is older than he is. Even the Greeks, who lumped children with slaves and women, associated them with nature and the gods. Like the fool, the madman, and those under the influence of soma, the child is sacred: "Wine and children tell the truth." Children served as intermediaries between initiates and the god in the Eleusian mysteries, since their very marginality was a "status they share with the gods."" The child is a cipher for the contrastive pair sacred/pro-' fane-a meaning polarity associated with the mysterious subversion of established order expressed in all taboo people. Jung called this projective image the "archetype of the divine child," and described it as representing a "paradoxical union between the lowest and the highest," and an original and terminal unity of conscious and unconscious,l2 As in Jung's thought, so in the Jesus sayings the "little child" represents an excluded fonn of knowledge. Not yet trapped in the separative individualism and stereotypic sedimentations of adulthood, the child represents the unity of knowledge and being, a fundamental paradigm of the structure of presence, and thereby is an involuntary witness to the truths of nature and of spirit. But this too is simply thedefmitive Western statement of an idea already present from ancient times-for example, "Above the heavens is Your majesty chanted by the mouths of children," or "He who is in harrnony...with the Tao is like a new born child."I) What the near universal acceptance of the Gospels as the grounding text for early European self-understanding did was to place this theme in the forefront. "Unless you tum and become as a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," became the guiding image for adult development. It was central to the spirituality of Bernard and his Cistercians, which shaped the "new piety" of

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

46

14

the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. St. Francis above all instantiated the Christian/platonic view of knowledge which understood the world as being turned upside down, and the wisdom of God regarded as foolishness by "reasonable" men: in a world where doxa and even ratio rule, the higher knowledge (noesis or intellectus) , apprehended non-discursively, becomes subversive. Francis's childlike "foolishness for Christ's sake" looked like it was turning the world upside down, but it was actually turning the world right side up again. So in the Western Christian knowledge tradition we have a first epistemology of childhood, related to the epistemology not only of the fool and the madman, but of the saint. IS This lradition, which understood what H6lderlin called the "Edenic self-unity of childhood"'6 to be prophetic of a higher knowledge which must be regained by the adult in the course of development, found new expression in the iconography of Renaissance art, where the divine child became a powerful symbol of the reconciliation of opposites--Qf heaven and earth, Christ and Dionysius, eros and agape. In his role as spouse-child of the queen of heaven, the naked, playing, infant Christ/Amor presents us wilh an image of edenic sexuality-what Freud called, in a perversely adultomorphic tum of phrase, the "polymorphous perverse." II was the mystery of the incarnation, of the flesh of God which so fascinated the Renaissance Christian,17 and the union of immanence and-trans~endence of the Incarnation was best represented by a child, who wa'Snotyet a divided being. Thus even at the gates of modernism the archetype of the divine child has an iconic power, a symbolic meaning penetrating to what Gombrich calls "new and unexpected categories of experience." The Child is a prime example of the Renaissance neo-Platonic understanding of the symbol in art as a kind of magic sign which "both hides

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and proclaims. ,,18 Paul's part of the tradition is, on the other hand, the kernel for the epistemology of modem adultism. It is connected with the Old Testament Hebraic tradition which understands "foolishness to be bound up in the heart of the child," and the Greek view of children as being citizens (i.e. humans) "by presumption only."'9 This founding view of the disjunction between adult and child is deeply connected with the history of hierarchy and domination in the West. As Boswell has pointed out, 'Tenns for 'child,' 'boy: and 'girl,' for example, are regularly employed to mean 'slave' or 'servant' in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and many medieval languages."20 Modem analogues of "child" as non-citizen, as part animal and part human. are implicit in 19th century evolutionary theory, which saw the human race as moving out of a barbaric "childhood" into "civilization" or adulthood. Whereas the ancients saw history either as cyclical or as a decline from a golden age of childhood, modernism posits progress as an increasing distantiation from childhood through an increasingly narrow definition of reason. The most blatant form of Ihis hyper-rational ization is Comte's, which forever brands the fonns of knowledge associated with childhood as merely "theological." This accompanies the "deficit" model of the child, the child understood as a not-yet-adult, a lower stage in the process of turning into a completed human being. It is exemplifed in Freud's remark: "The psychology of children, in my opinion, is to be called upon for services similar to those which a study of the anatomy and development of the lower animals renders to the investigation of the structure of the highest classes of animals. ,,21 The deficit model of childhood was also used against colonial peoples and non-Western cultures as, according to Nandy, a "design of cultural and political immaturity or, it comes to the same thing,

inferiority." As he points ou t, childhood, like primitive culture, becomes for the modem adult an occasion for "terror,,,n a lost paradise of instinctual liberation from a condition of extreme rationalization, which is both feared and longed for-a boundary cond ition of love and death. These two understandings of childhoodas representing a pre- (and implicitly post-) adult unity of knowledge and being, and as subhuman-make their way together into modem thought, where their ambivalence informs our narratives about self and its origins. Freud exemplifies this ambivalence most dramatically: his narrative of self-formation exudes a grim realism, which sees repression of the overwhelming sexual and aggressive drives of the child as necessary to civ ilization; but its barely hidden subtext urges romantic rebellion against repression, in the interests of instinctualljberation. This inherent contradiction in his thought is exemplified in the "normal" neurosis of the Freudian modal adult personality, who is by definition in con flict with his own childhood, and still Jjving his childhood conflicts. On the one hand, the only cure for Freud's norma) neurotic is "education," i.e., the eradication of childhood through progressive rationali23 zation. On the other hand, the impIlcit message of the Freudian mythos is that instinctualliberation represents the longed for paradise of primary process, that total unity of subject and object where aU my objects are also my inner projections, and hence a state of psychological uni ty, and thereby "heaven," if the heaven of hallucinatory omnipotence. This is taken very seriously by certain of Freud's disciples-Brown and 24 Marcuse in particular -and has tremendous influence on the late 20th century cultural revolution in mores.2.I And this primary narcissism, which has become the implicit (if tragically unattainable) form of salvation for an atheistic, secular culture, is the domain of

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD 47

the child. Childhood and the Crisis of Modernism

Freud's narrative teaches us that, as Lippitz says, "my childhood is never a closed chapter in the story of my development."u My identity as an adult is detennined by the child that I still am, as the child's identity is determined by the adult he or she will be. Childhood is in me a form of know ledge. As a modem, rationalized adult, it is a form of knowledge from which I have distanced myself in my approach to objects, to time, to the body, and to the other. As an excluded form of knowledge-"disowned and repressed" as Nandy calls it-it represents for modernism a "persistent, living, irrepressible criticism of our 'rational,' 'normal,' 'adult' vision of desirable societies. ,,7:7 lhis persistent criticism is clearly marked in the mainstream Western literary tradition, and bears tracing out. It is frrst strongly articulated in the poets of childhood of 17th century England. In Henry Vaughan adulthood represents an epistemological narrowing beyond which childhood as a fonn of lmowledge has escaped: "I cannot reach it; and my striving eyelDazzles at it, as at eterni~. ,,28 For Andrew Marvell, poet of the cunning ironies of modem adult-child distanciation, childhood represents an Edenic state, doomed to loss through simply growing up and entering the human legacy of sexual passion, decay, and death. Even when, as in "Upon Appleton House," he returns to Eden and experiences the psychological unity associated with childhood for a moment, his paradise quickly turns into a prison from which he is eager to escape. Marvell also introduces the modem theme of the reversal of adult and child: the child is an unconscious master, involuntary instructor in the state of immediacy. She lives the lordship over nature which is the result of participatory knowing, rather than the separation implicit

PHll..OSOPHY TODAY 48

in the Cartesian cogito, and the Baconian attempt at mastery. 29 So he says of the child Mary: 'Tis She that to these Gardens gave That wondrous Beauty which they have; She streightness on the Woods bestows; To Her the Meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the River be So Chrystal-pure but only She; She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, and Fair,

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But Mary, like aU children, lives, even at the height of her power, under the sign of childhood's end; this irony, which Marvell playfully explores, has become a fuD-blown tragic theme one hundred years later, in Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College." Here adulthood and civilization are clearly associated with doom and a fallen condition, and childhood becomes, as Pattison says, "a vehicle for investigating the original condition of society and ascertaining the fWlCiamentals of man's role within civilization.',31 Thomas Traheme, on the other hand, although accepting the fact of distantiation, explores the epistemology, not only of childhood. but of the recovery of childhood In Vaughan, Marvell, and Gray this theme of recovery is certainly not forgotten, but it becomes dark and ironic, beset by the tragedy of the West's loss of innocence in general. Traheme's spiritual experience and his religious tradition drive him beyond the m0ment of distantiation, towatds reappropriation. Infant intentionality becomes associated with an original vision, one accomplished in adulthood only through spiritual catharsis, and the restoration of the unity of knowledge and being, wherein creation is understood again as fully animate, an expression of the glory of God.

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Traheme's notion that the task of adulthood is a nature returned to itself, a kind of knowledge which is not the result of a division, but an expression or an apprehension of a real unity, finds a new, naturalistic expression in Romantic art and philosophyWordsworth and Coleridge, Novalis, Schelling's philosophy of identity, and Schiller's philosophy of genius and of play. The Romantic theme of what Charles Taylor bas called "the spiral vision of history:' finds a fall from unity necessary to development. This idea, which informs not only Hegel's narrative of the journey/quest of Geist-a quest of the spirit to recover itself, to be "at home with itself in its otherness"n-but also evolutionary and developmental thought in the sciences (for example, Piaget's notion of growth as constant restructuring), is a concept which has a historical and cultural analogue in the loss and recovery of childhood. It will be repeated. in another genre and in another register in Freud and his followers, except that there the heaven of Traheme's "Want-Ey"n is replaced by the heaven of instinct-i.e., primary narcissism, the freedom from the tyrrany of genital organization and the Oedipus complex, with their cruel domination of human relationships and culture. Thus, beginning even in the mid 17th century, the teleology of adulthood expressed in Baconian science, in the grave seriousness of reformed pietism, and the new idea of adult civilite,34 has come to be seen as a prison of consciousness. The writings of Rousseau (who is almost an exact contemporary of Thomas Gray) on childhood and children, so profoundly influential in the West, express with a new poignancy what has been described as a culture aware of having reached a "turning point in its development" associated with the crisis of modernism. JS Rousseau directly questions the VIability of the Western adult. For Rousseau, one cannot be

both "man" and "citizen." In order to exist, the "citizen" must exclude nature and the unconscious, both of which coine increasingly to be associated with childhood. Reappropriating nature and the unconscious is analogous to reappropriating childhood, which thus becomes the strongest symbol for that return to a fundamental form of intentional unity which constantly eludes the Western adult. Childhood comes to lie, in di fferent modalities, both before and beyond adulthood. Thus Hegel: "The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift of the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labour and culture of the spirit.',)6 In this necessary voyage out of unity into multiplicity, and towards a unity painfully regained on a higher level, there is implicit the possibility of "the end of history," for it is repression (i.e. division, self-alienation) which generates historicaJ time. 37 The recovery of childhood promises, if as an eternally receding goal, a utopia based on the adult reappropriation of all the elements of the child's form of life, and therefore based, as Reinhard Kuhn puts it, on "the transparence of its inhabitants and the subsequent perfection of their interrelationship. This ideaJ harmony would make possible the abolition of the rules of civilization and would resull in a 'humanity without aesthetic and social laws. ",3~ In this countermodem, post-adult utopia, as in early childhood, the disti.nction between public and private self is abolished, we "live and feel in the present," and live a "unitary, undivided existence." The polarities which make for the "dividedness, alienation, and inner deadness of modernity"between spirit and maller, mind and nature, desire and necessity-are broken. This new, high Romantic mediation between thought and feeling takes the child and the artist as its exemplary symbols. Significantly enough. this moment of idealization of childhood as a boundary condi-

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

49

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tion corresponds with the rise of the "Childhood" in autobiography, which began to crystalize as a literary genre around 1835. 39 The writer of the Childhood may be characterized as the "citizen" in search of the "man," of an originaJ, lost identity. He or she looks to the founding, sacramental cosmos of the child in a "quest for patterns and meanings of existence. ,,40 As a historical marker the Childhood signals the complete separation of adult and child, for as Coe, in his study of the genre, has pointed out, "to write about himself as a child the author must have ceased to be a child. ,,41 It is an artifact of the moment of greatest distanciation from childhood, which is also the moment of the initiation of dialogue with the knowledge ofchildhood. Thus Coe can say, "The Child began to be treated seriously when the Man was forced to stop fmding the same kind of delight in the world as he had done when a child; that is, when all men save tile poets were forbidden to shape any save the most marginal fragments of their adult lives around the 'other-dimensionality' of childhood.,,42 The increasingly manneristic treatment of childhood in later bourgeois Victorian sentimentaJism about the innocence of children should not blind us to the seriousness of this theme for the teleology of modem adulthood. The hermeneutics of childhood in Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake, Holderin, Novalis and others, who bring what is inchoate in Rousseau to new clarity, are concerned with the fusion of horizons with childhood in the interests of a developmental (and therefore educational) ideaL The goal of successful development is to "carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood. ,,43 In fact the drive to integrate the "physical and psychological density of the childhood experience',44 into the mature psyche represents the modem version of the fulfillment of the Gospel command: the Saved is he or she who

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

50

has not lost---{)r has regained--childhood. As Kuhn says of Wordsworth's vision: 'The childhood paradise is no longer a transient phase through which one passes on the way to the miseries or to the joys of adulthood. It is an omnipresent reality that can shape our whole existence and that makes possible the poetic act''''s There is clearly a connection between this project and the phenomenological project as expressed in Merleau-Ponty and Marcel, who are in search of an "expanded reason," as well as in the postrnodern project, which though its primary metaphor is transgression rather than dialecticaJ return, yet aspires equally to "that freshness of sensation" identified by Coleridge as the earmark of appropriation. 46 In fact, postrnodernism may be seen as a sort of libertine gnostic Romanticism,47 an approach to the origins represented by childhood through a "disordering of all the senses," which, though it renders the origins a boundary and an abyss, yet still aspires to dance above the abyss like a child. So Nietzsche, speaking of the three "metamorphoses" of the spirit of man: "The Spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, fmally, a cbild. ,,48 The Well of Being

Por an archeology of lived experience, child,hood intentionality is at least analogous to the concrete, pre-reflective unity, or "phenomenal body" which undergirds reflection. Affectively, it is often spoken of as a kind of joy, a sense of what Coleridge called "Life Unconditioned,''''9 a basic trust of the universe, and a sense of personal integrity which transcends any rational explanation. This is at least one aspect of the "enlarged self," and "the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason." But as we have seen, and perhaps best represented in Freud, it is aLso affect-laden with terrorthe terror associated with the loss of self's boundaries, and the contrastive pair

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heaven/hell which characterizes the life of pure desire, or primary process. The latter is a theme in the postmodern deconstruction of subjectivity, and in the postmodern metaphysics of transgression, for which childhood becomes, with bestiality and divinity, a marker for pure presence, or "life without differance." Thus, the postmodem hermeneutics of childhood is a "tum" from the phenomenological hermeneutics of childhood, for which childhood grounds rather than destroys self. ] will take each of these narratives in turn. In tihe phenomenological tradition, Marcel speaks of a "secondary reflection," which moves to recover the unity, the level of"participation" which "primary reflection," in breaking the link with body and world, disperses.~o Similarly, Merleau-Ponty undertakes a "radical" or "hyper-reflection," which is concerned to search out "a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one which endows the latter with its relative validity, and at the same time assigns to it its place. ,,~I Radical reflection is a "reflection open to the unreflective, the reflecti ve assumption of the unreflective.',s2 Through it Merleau-Ponty uncovers an ontology of the body for which the child is a sort of proof tex.t. The unreflective cannot be "known" in the adult sense of the term, which implies a doubling of consciousness-knowing that you know. Once a person is in a position to reflect on the forms of knowledge of childhood, he or she is by defmition no longer a child, and therefore no longer lives in that form of knowledge. 'DIe unreflective immediate can only be assumed, and therefore exists for adults as a limit condition. As Mecleau-Ponty says, "A lost immediate, arduous to restore, will, if we do restore it, bear within itself the sediment of the critical procedures through which we will have found it anew; it will therefore not be the immediate."53 The

process of reflexivity is irreversible. The child, like the human life-cycle itself, is fatefully ordered toward reflection, and the subject-object separation implicit in adult "knowledge." Thus for the not-child, the adult, there are no longer any words which refer directly to the child's form of knowledge. Bernanos says, "The deadest of the dead is the little boy I used to be." But the hermeneutical relation of the adult with childhood and the child places, through a dialectical process of reappropriation, that lost form of knowledge in the adult's future. Thus Bemanos can add, "but when the time comes it is he who will resume his place at the head of my life." And Htilderin states plai nly, 'The intimations of childhood must be resurrected as truth in the spirit of man. ,,54 The "more fundamental Logos" of which Merleau-Ponty speaks may be characterized as, rather than a synthetic activity of the subject, a perpetual ekstasis, wherein subject and object are "two abstract 'moments' of a unique structure which is presence.'.55 He has described it as the experience of"that oneness of man and the world, which is not indeed abolished, but repressed by everyday perception or by objective thought...~6 This form of subjectivity is timeless, because it is the time of body and world. Insofar as the body lives in time, it lives self as present, for it is always co-original with the world which it also is, with which it is in a state of mutual generation.~7 MerleauPonty says: We are forced to recognize the existence of a consciousness having behind it no consciousness to be conscious of it which, consequently, is not arrayed out in time, and in which being coincides with being for itself. We may say that ultimate consciousness is "timeless" (zeitlose) in the sense that it is not intratemporal ... to be now is to be from always and for ever. Subjectivity is not in time, because it takes up or lives

HERMENEUTICS OF CHlLDHOOD 51

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time, and merges with the cohesion of a 58 life. Ekstasis as a characteristic form ofknowledge in early childhood is in fact the testimony of many authors of childhood memoirs, who characterize (he "fear and the glory" of childhood as a relationship with the inanimate world which is qualjtatively different from the typical adult's. In his study of the experience of childhood, found that "In a significantly large number of cases, the supreme ecstasies of childhood arise out ofcontact with the inanimate-not with doUs or other toys which are simulations of known,living beings, not even (although this is encountered more frequently) with natural phenomena such as trees or sunsets-but with bricks or snowflakes or pebbles." They are often described as "magical, not in the sense of wands or wizardry, but in the sense that pure existence in itself is magical and miraculous.,,59 Although the child, as Traheme says, is "dumb," and lives before human language, perception itself is interlocu60 tive. In fact the child knows no distinction between speech and silence, for the world speaks to childhood intentionality in its own tongues. Nor has this interlocutive world always been limited to children; it is in fact the same preliterate, oral cosmos which preceded that reification of childhood in children which accompanied the West's coming 61 of age. It is the world of mysterious correspondences, of pars pro toto, and of the concrete universal. As Traheme sings it:

eoe

. . . evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue, And evry Gale of Wind a Curious Song. The Heavens were an Orakle, and spake Divinity: The Earth did undenake The office of a Priest; and I being Dum (Nothing besides was dum;) All things did com With Voices and Instructions; but when I Had gaind a Tongue, their Power began to

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 52

d'Ie. 62

The adult sees and remembers and imagines the child as living at the "ultimate barrier" between self and not-self. 63 It is that barrier that the modem adult is drawn to as to a distant freedom. Infancy is a marker for a form of subjectivity wruch, in distinction from the transcendental synthetic activity of the Kantian subject. is always already there in the world. The Kantian adult, who has retreated into the categories, from wruch he constructs the world, feels this form of subjectivity as a threat; he is powerfully drawn out of himself, whether toward anni.hilation or a "hidden noumenal reaJity,,64 is never clear. In David Malou f's novel An Imaginary Life the adult character, out wandering toward his own death on the vast Caucasian plains, accompanied by a "wild child," fmds himself at the barrier: f try to preCIpItate myself into his consciousness of the world ... but fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as pan of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Chi Id is otherwise. J try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and am immediately struck with panic, as if, in losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it off my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get 65 back.

As Malouf's adult implies, the irony of the adult-chiLd economy is that the form of life of the child can never be experienced by one who knows he is experiencing it. The child who knows he is a child already has the point of view of the adult: adulthood is a horizon

toward \ The adl within, ' he neve) zon ofd age, whi sees hirr. The a with chi Iytical e characte: ofa "weI ship beh both a rl

life," ane whkh is tanceof, as the "a principle mony wi rung ... < ... archa "with ch "astonish of wondel andabov( being," ar responde where "ili world," ~ me," and life.',66 TI MerJeauworld, th~ ~cit cogil leveL of ill perceptior expressior thought an ondary" ql mension 0 the world. qua embo commune' precisely a

image bars that I to as ~er for n.ction lily of I there 10 has ich he If subdrawn ilation never

ginary

ng to.casian " finds

(;onMy

gine

Jog,

:; an

rther

that 'ents rJins.

The

nust: I am If, in

idual little :re in r gel

Iy of the 1 of life I by one Ile child ~e point horizon

toward which he travels, and thus already is. The adult carries this Child as a horizon within, toward which he travels, but which he never reaches. The child carries the horizon of the adult within himself from an early age, which he does reach, passes beyond, and sees himself again in the distance. The adult's movement through dialogue with childhood beyond the separative, analytical ego-ideal of primary reflection is characterized by Bachelard as an uncovering of a "well of being"-a transformed relationship between knower and known, which is both a return to an original, "monumental life," and a move forward into that integrity which is connected in adults with the acceptance of death. Bachelard refers to childhood as the "archetype of simple happiness ... a principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibilities of a new beginning ... a pure threshold of life, original life ... archaic being." We love things, he says, "with childhood." Childhood is itself the "astonishment of being"; it is "under the sign of wonder." Ontologically, it is "below being and above nothingness," "the antecedence of being," an "anonymous" place of"secret correspondences" between self and world, where "the I no longer opposes itself to the world," where "everything I look at looks at me," and "everything lives with a secret life.'>66 The well of being is equivalent to Merleau-Ponty's logos of the aesthetic world, the lived chiasm of the anonymous, tacit cogito, or phenomenal body. At this level of intentionality, the world is still one; perception is always also the spontaneous expression of meaning. Any separation of thought and being, or of "primary" and "secondary" qualities is unthinkable. In this dimension of subjectivity, I am an "openjng to the world." As Zaner says: "Not only am 1, qua embodied, with things, but also they commune with me, are with me-for they are precisely at once inexhaustible, having their

own propet ecceity, and they are significations for me endowed by means of my em1 bodied acti'lity on and with th.,em.'t6 Here, indeed, the human subject does not bestow or construct meaning, nor is meaning "hidden behind" anything, but is an essential element of the structure of existence. In this dimension of subjectivity, there is no distinction between knowing and being. Bachelard's ontology of what he calls the "permanent child" is confinned in lung's psychological analysis of the child archetype. He calls the child archetype an "element of our psychic structure" which, in its emergence in dream, fantasy, art, and reflection, signals a process of integration of conscious and unconscious elements of personaJjty, the onset of the "shifting of the centre of the personaJjty from the ego to the self." "Self," in Jung's terminology, is the "goal of the individuation process," a synthesis, in fact a unity of opposites in the personality, whereby there is experienced "a wholeness that transcends consciousness." The child archetype is thus a "unifying symbol," a "link with that original condition," in lung's terms, a bringing of unconscious elements of personality into harmony with the relatively narrow forms of reflective consciousness. Thus, for psychoanalysis, "child" symbolizes "the all-embracing ni\ture of psychic wholeness," or "pre-conscious" and "postconscious" state, "both begmnmg and end." "It is a personification of vital forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind; of ways and possibilities of which our one-sided conscious mind knows nothing; a wholeness which embraces the very depths of nature.',68 On this account, childhood is then "an anticipation by analogy of life after death," a limit condition representing immortality in that it stands for the return to the unconscious, which is eternity, the realm of the timeless, the sacred, or pure presence, the unity of knower and known which is prom-

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD 53

( r ised in consciousness, but which is con- -expelled man from paradise,,,7. which is a stantly eluding the adult who is cut off from classic Romantic ideal. In Freud's Romantic his source. It also armounces that enJarged followers, the global, narcissistic eroticism subjectivity., the integration of the irrational of the infant organization of desire becomes into an expanded reason, represented by both the promise of this state and the proofJung's Self, which is the place of conscious text of its downfall in human family and and unconscious integration. As such, it also civilization, where the hope it represents for stands for the abolition of repression, that instinctual liberation is continually betrayed possibility which always haunts adult conPostmodernism is a radicalization of the sciousness. terms of the EnlightenmentlRomantic paradox, and a Promethean assumption of its The Hermeneutics of Childhood and Posttragic conflict. On the Enlightenment side, it modernism represents a fmal separation of reason from nature, initiated in Kant and carried to an The paradoxes expressed in the two conextreme in Nietzsche and his followers. 72 For tradictory views of childhood described postmodemism, "nature" is a production of above are part of a larger modernist narrative supplementarity, which, analogous to about the epistemological conflict between Hegel's Reason, creates such pretexts in the EnJightenment and Romanticism. From the point of view of the henneneutics of child- interests of its own (goals). That supplemenbood, the Romantic project of the recovery tarity is not Reason, but Reason deconof childhood is actually a dialectical move of structed makes it no less an all encompassing "overcoming" or sublation of Enlighten- rationalization, which replaces logos with ment, because it represents a new self-under- grarrunar, and foundation with inscriptions standing through the appropriation that fol- created by the play of differance. Accordingly"-as for Enlightenment so lows from the distanciation from lived expedeconstruction-childhood is not a posifor rience, and the narrowing of the defmition of tive state, but merely a deficit. Like "nature" reason which characterized Enlightemnent. and "God," "childhood" is a concept which The henneneutics of childhood in postsupplementarity uses to defme itself, but, like modernity offers a further turn in the plot of the narrative. This tum has one precursor in Kant's noumenal, it is a limit condition, and Freud, whose thought plays within the dia- has no truth value in itself. Thus postrnodlectical tensions and secret correspondences ernism tends to view children in the classical between Enlighterunent and Romanticism. 69 rationalist tradition as not-yet human creaFreud's narrative of early childhood, which tures. Derrida's child, like Aristotle's, is hinges on the conflict between primary proc- "sometimes on the side of animality, someess and the reality principle, is also about the times on the side of humanity_ ,,13 For Derrida, conflict between reason and nature. Their childhood, far from exemplifying a fundaconflict is tragic, in that becoming an adult mental human nature, is "the first manifestameans "overcoming the residues of child- tion of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls hood,,70 through the "educatio~" of psycho- for substitution,,74 in the form of education analysis, i.e. reason overcoming nature. But and training in order to become an adult. the adult is never free of a nostalgia for and Childhood is the weakness, the fault, which an involuntary belief in the possibility of life demonstrates that nature is not "pure pres: before (or after) repression, of nature uncon- ence," but just one among the play of signistrained, without "that sense of shame which fiers of (adult) supplementarity. Far from the

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 54

"meaninj ence ofc ticipate il therefore texte." 51 become; into a us( ity-"he how to ~ acquired like natu hood, is; On tll represen against 1 maintain of the at dialectic: mental Ii postrnod ogy or d the monl Theprirr is only a the patri. gin), ani imaginal repressic nificant and the c of the hI Bataille gression for 'the ( murdero h the mate where ttl liberated imposed The chi Freud's. bivalent consciOl Thus postmod

vhich is a Romantic eroticism ~ becomes the proofunily and 'esentS for , betrayed. ion of the Intic paraion of its ent side, it ason from ned to an 72 vers. For :luction of ogous to ~xts in the lpplemenIn deconImpassing )gos with IS criptions :oment so lot a posie "nature" ept which f, but, like Lition, and postrnode classical man creatotle's, is ity, someIr Derrida, : a fundananifestalture, calls education an adult. ult, which ?ure presV of signi,r from the

"meaningless [sic] ofthe supposed full presence of childhood ,,,75 the child does not participate in the "order of the supplement," and therefore is not a human being-she is "hors texte." She will only be human when she has become an adult, i.e. when she has entered into a use of language which shows retlexivity-"he will no longer weep, he will know how to say 'I hurt,,'76-i.e., when she has acquired the adult horizon. The prereflective, like nature, like pure presence, like childhood, is a construct, without truth value. On the Romantic side, postmodemism represents a radicalization of the revolt against repression, and the reason which maintains it. Whereas the Romantic notion of the abolition of repression involves the dialectical recovery of an originary, "monumental life," leading to an "enlarged" reason, postrnodemism has done away with teleology or dialectic, and thus can only recover the monumental life through transgression. The primal paradise of the pleasure principle is only attained by a crime-the murder of the patriarch, the self-severing from an (origin), and self-creation through art or the imagination. For this ideal of liberation from repression and sublimation, childhood is significant because, like madness, bestiality, and the divine, it represents a limit condition of the human. Marchak, in her analysis of Bataille and Kristeva, describes the transgression of those limits as a "ceaseless search for 'the desirable, terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body, '" i.e., primary narcissism, where the ego is all instinctual body, and is Liberated from the super-ego of "paternallyimposed prohibitions, taboos, and law."n The child ceaselessly sought for here is Freud's and Melanie Klein's cauldron of ambivalent instinct, projected as the goal of consciousness. Thus either way childhood is construed in postmodemism, whether on the EnJighten-

ment side or the Romantic side, it disappears into a limit condition. Indeed, to the degree that postmodemism represents the death of the subject, it is also the death of childhood, because the child's su~jectivity is found before language, in nature and the body, in the "logos of the aesthetic world." The state of immediacy ("pure presence") represented by childhood, in that it is a state outside the play of supplementarity, an "excluded other," a limit condition, is also a nihilation, a not-human. So Marchak can say, " ... in that place beyond, 'man' disappears.,,78 The Romantic seeks to reappropriate a lost immediate through dialogue with those other forms of knowledge represented by chil~hood, madness, the primitive, etc., and integrate it into an "enlarged" subjectivity. Postmodernism cannot allow for the moment of appropriation, because both the self and the "structure of presence" are merely inscriptions pro79 duced by the play of differance. Having deconstructed the subject, the postrnodem individual can only find that monumental life through the violation of supplementarity itself. Hence what Marchak describes as the "joy of transgression," the "journey to the end of the possible in man ... where ultimately subject and object become fused, inextricable, in ecstasy and anguish," which involves the liberation of "outlawed (spontaneous) drives.',81J This theme is also present in Derrida's thought: "Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality. primitivism. childhood. madness, divinity. The approach to these limits is at once feared as a threat of death and desired as access to a life without difjerance."SI

The postmodem project, rather than one of expansion of the notion of reason through incorporation of the irrational, requires a

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD 55

I·

break into the irrational, in order to eseape the hegemony of supplementarity. Only through violation is it possible "to rise above his [man's] subordination, to break out of the law of reason,..82 to go beyond language, beyond supplementarity, beyond the human. The postmodern project is thus an anti-humanism, the project ofbecoming both divine and bestial. As Harvey says: 'We have extended the field beyond the subject, beyond the object, beyond the sayable as such, beyond the as such and therefore must approach animality on the one hand and divinity on the other." This extension of the field beyond the human subject is associated with the end of history:83 the animal/god, having done away with repression and sublimation,

and accomplished "the Oedipal project of becoming father of oneself,',s4 Lives apart from becoming and contradiction, in a state of pure play, of suspension from goal. This state, like the archetype of the divine child, is both pre-human and posthuman, but, in deconstruction, assumes the death of the subjeet, rather than the enlargement of subjectivity through dialogue. It is associated with the primary narcissism of childhood, and the heaven of instinctual Liberation, but only as another mark of its otherness, of its location "beyond the boundaries." It also does away with a hermeneutics of childhood. The gods, after all, although they are eternal children, have no childhood, nor do they have chiJdren.

ENDNOTES

and a of SOl ing a

politil mall.y durinl ups e

popuJ status they

I

lord, them lIren" pcrsOi "child Middl (New 21.

QUOle

Child Unive

I. F. Ashis Nandy. "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of

8. "For Descartes and Malebranche. the child was a failed

22. Nand

the Ideology of Adulthood," in Tradirions, Tyranny, and

adult." Richard Cae, When rlie Grass Was Taller: Aurobi-

23. Freul

Uropias (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1981) p. 71.

ography and rhe Experience of Childhood (New Haven:

educa

Yale University Press, 1984), p. 18.

childh

2. Walter Misgeld, "Self-Reflection and Adult Maruriry: AduJt and OtiJd in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection," PIu!-

nomenology + Pedagogy 3:3 (1985): 93. 3. For an account of the origins of the modem instinuionali-

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 92.

10. Ibid., p. 63.

chey, '

logiet HogllJ

zalion of childhood. see Philippe Aries, Cenruries of

II. Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in C/as.,ical Arh-

24. "The

Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Robe.r1

ens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1990),

sion.'·

Baldick,lrans. (New York: Knopf. 1962). For an account

pp. 10, 11.44.

choa,.,

of the rise of civilite, and its relation to the "growing

12. Jung and Kerenyi, pp. 79 ff.

distance between adults and children," see Norben EI ias,

13. Psalm 8:2 (see also Matt. 21:14-16); Tan Te Ching. Verse

The Civilizing Process: The Hisrory of Manners (New Yoric Urizen Books, 1978).

55.

Wesle has to could

14. Mary M. Mclaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates: Parents

A PhI

4. See Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen MilcheU (New York:

and Children from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,"

Press.

Harpu& Row, 1988), verses 20, 28,52,55.68; C. G. Jung

in Lloyd deMause. ed., The History of Childhood (New

25. The iJ

e. Kerenyi. Essays on a Science of Mythology: The

and

Myrh of rhe Divine Child and rhe Mysreries of £lellSis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Plato's

York: Harper & Row, 1974). p. 133. 15. See David Kennedy. "Fools, Young Children. and Philosophy," Thinking 8:4 (1990): 2-6.

Politicus. cited in KathJeen Raine, Blake and Antiquity

16. M. H. Abrams, Narural Supernaruralism: Tradirion and

(Princeton: Princeton Universiry Press, BoUingen. 1977).

Revolution in Romaneic Literarure (New Yorle: Norton,

pp.

57~; Matt.18:2~.

5. Paul RicoclU. Hermeneurics and rhe Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Prc8s, 1981), p. 144. 6. Ibid, p. 192.

7. Enunanuel Levinas, Torality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso

197\), p. 239. 17. Leo Stein.be.rg, TIu! Sexuality ofChrisr in Renaissance Arc

all soc 26. Wilfri ing

WI

and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

Befon 4:3 (I'

Ihe Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 168. 19. Golden. p. 39.

277.

20. And Boswell. continues: "This is a philological subtlety

56

oofoun< ended

18. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in rhe Arr of

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universiry Press, 1969), p.

PHILOSOPHY TODA Y

by the Freud

27. Nandl 28. From

L.e.

~

.t

of

and a social one. In modem Western democracies everyone

Jart

of sound mind achieves independent adult status on attain-

29. It is of at least passing interest

10

note that even Bacon's

project, which we associate with Western adult hostility

late

ing a prescribed age: the primary distinction in social and

towards nature, is predicated on a "return to the condition

bis

political capacity is between children and adults. and nor·

of the original Eden by way of man's resumption of the

ild, ,m ub-

eclith

mally everyone occupies each position in succession. But

"purity and integrity" of the mind of the child: with "the

during most of Western history only a minority of grown·

understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed. the entrance

ups ever achieved such independence: the rest of the

into the k.ingdom of man. founded on the sciences," is "nol

population remained throughout their lives in a juridical

much other than the entrance into the kindgdom of heaven.

status more comparable to "childhood." in the sense that

where into none may enter except as a little child." Quoted

they remained under someone else's control-a father. a

in Abrams, p. 60.

the , as

lord. a master. a husband, etc. . . . [these] social roles themselves (slave. serf, servant, etc.) were those of "chil-

spair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth·Century

ion vay Ids, en, :lil-

dren" in terms of power and juridical standing, whether the

Literature (Pinsburgh: University of Pinsburgh Press,

person discharging them was young or old. Words for "children" designate servile adults well into the High Middle Ages. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Pantheon. 1988). pp. 27-28.

30. Quoted in Leah S. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural De·

1978), p. 235. 31. Roben Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literafllre (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1978), p. 33.

32. QUOled in Abrams. p. 230.

21. Quoted in Reinhard Kuhn. Corruption in Paradiu: The

33. See "An Infant-Ey," in The Poetical Works of Thomas

Child in Western Literature (Hanover. NH: New England

Traherne. ed. Gladys I. Wade (New York: Cooper Square.

University Press, 1982), p. 12.

1965), p. 104.

liled

22. Nandy, pp. 57, 58.

'obi-

23. Freud described psychoanalysis as "a prolongation of

advance of the shame-frontier and the growing distance

yen:

education for the purposes of overcoming the residues of

between adults and children ... the wall between people,

:ton:

34. Elias described the rise of civiliti in Europe as "the

childhood." Five Lectures 011 Psychoanalysis. In J. SITa-

the reserve, the emotional barrier erected by conditioning

chey, cd.. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-

between one body and another, grows continually" (p.

logical Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hoganh Press. 1957), Vol. 11, p. 48.

168). 35. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art. vol. 2 (New

Ath-

24. 'The question facing mankind is the abolition of repres-

York: Vintage, 1951). p. 167. And see Joseph Feather·

'90),

sion." Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death: The Psy-

stone. "Rousseau and Modernity," Daedalus-I 07 (Summer

choanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Cf: erse

'Cnts les.'· \jew

oso-

1978); 167-92.

Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 308. "Civilization

36. Quoted in Abrams, p. 380.

has to defend itself against the spectre of a world which

37. Btown. p. 93.

could be free." Herben Marcuse. Eros and Civilization:

38. Kuhn. p.229.

A Philosophical InqUiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon

39. Coc, p. 40.

Press, 1955), p. 93.

40. £bid., p. 75.

25. The influence on late 20th century mores is complicated

41. Ibid., p. 77.

by the fact that it is confused with the other stream of post-

42. Ibid .. p. 247.

Freudian soteriology exemplified in Wilhelm Reich, who

43. Coleridge, quoted in Judith Plolz, "The Perpetual Messiah:

"foundered on the theory of infantile sexualily ... and

Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human

and

ended up in glorification of lIle orgasm as the solution to

Development:' in

10n.

all social and bodily ailments" (Brown. p. 29).

ChIldren/Liberated C1Ii/dren (New York: Psychohislory

26. Wilfried Lippitz, "Understanding Children, Communicat~

Art

ing with Children: Approaches

10

the Child Within Us,

l.

Before Us. and With Us," PhellOmenology + Pedagogy

rt of

4:3 (1986): 59. 27. Nandy. pp.

uety

n. 58.

Barbara Finkelstein. ed.• Regulated

Press. 1977), p. 81. 44. Plotz p. 77. 45. Kuhn. p. 208. 46. Quoted in Abrams. p. 379. 47. Cf. Rosen's loaded statement: "The future of Enlighten-

28. From Henry Vaughan. "Childe-hood," in Works. 2d ed.,

ment is Romanticism disguised as post modernism," And

L.C. Martin. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 520.

he adds, "No doubt the future of poslmodemism is yet

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD 57

anOlher disguise of Enlightenmenl." Stanley Rosen, Her-

meneuticsas Politics (New York: Oltford University Press. 1987),p.181.

Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 123,125,193,126,116,127,188, 108, III. 125, 135, 162, 193, 197,198, 167, 185, 188. 67. zaner, p. 188.

48. Friedrich Nie17.sche, Thu.s Spake Zorathustra. in The

Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New Yorlr.: Viking Press, 1954), p. 137.

68. Jung and Kcrenyi, pp. 100,83,97,89. 69. Gadamer approaches this view when he speaks of Roman· ticism in its project of "retrieval of origins," as a "radicali·

49. Quoted in Plotz, p. 77.

zation of the enlighterunenl." Hans-Georg Gal1amer. Truth

50. For Gabriel Marcel on secondary renection, see his The

and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975). p. 244. See

} I

also David Kennedy, "[mages of the Young Child in His·

{

I, pp. 77-102; and Homo Viator: Introduction to a Meta-

tory: En[ightenment and Romance," Early Childlwod Re·

I

physics of Hope, uans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Har-

search Quarterly 3 (1988): 121-37.

Mystery of Being (Soulll Bend,

[N:

Gateway, 1951), vol.

perTorchbook, 1962), p. 100. 51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smilll. (UJndon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 365. 52. Ibid, p. 359. 53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the 'nvisible (Evanston: Norlllweslem University Press. 1964), p. 122. 54. Bemanos quoted in Kuhn, p. 62; Hlliderin quoted in Kuhn, p. 169: Hegel quoted in Abrams, p. 380.

70. See Note 23. above. 71. Brown, p. 31.

72. For an argument for the continuity between Kant and "Ni~11.sche,

75. Irene Harvey. Derrida and the Economy of Differance (Bloominglon: Indiana University Press, (986), p. 223.

and Kristeva," Philosophy Today 34 (Winter 1990): 360. 78. [bid. p. 361.

58. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 422.

79. Gary Brenl Madison makes this point in The Hermeneutics

Compare Brown: "If ... we go beyond Freud, and specu-

ofPostmodemiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

late seriously on llle possibility of a consciousness nOI

1988), p. 115.

based on repression but conscious of what is now uncon-

80. Man:hak. p. 359.

scious. lllen it foUows a priori that such a consciousness

81. Harvey, p. 186.

would be nOl in time bUI in eternity. And in fact eternity

82. Marchak, p. 357.

seems to be Ihe lime in which childhood lives" (p. 94).

83. "The unrepressed animal carries no instinctual project to

59. Coc. p. 113.

change his own nature; mankind must pass beyond repres-

60. For a discussion of "how linguistic structures mirror and

sion if il is to lind a life not governed by the unconscious

analogiz.e the structures of perceptions," see Maurice Mer·

project of fmding another klnd of life .... After man's

leau·Ponty. ConsciOllsness and the Acquisition of Lan·

unconscious search for his proper mode of being has

guage.trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern

ended-after history has ended-particular members of

University Press. 1973), p.uiv.

the human species can lead a IiII' which. like the lives of lower organisms. individually embodies llle nature of the species ...an individual life which enjoys full satisfaction

62. Traheme. p. 25 ("Dumnesse").

and concretcly embodies the full essence of the species.

63. Coc. p. 125.

and in which fife and death are simultaneously affinned,

64. Brown, p. 94.

because life and death together conSlitute individuality,

65. David MaJour. An Imaginary Life (New York: George

and ripeness is all," Brown. p. 106. And see Rosen's

Bmjllcr. 1978), p. 96.

66. Gaston Bachelard. The Poerics of Rever;e: Childhood. Language. and the Cosmos. trans. Damel Russell (BaSIon:

TI been West aclitl beSt t ism ( theor this i: profo the c( the fa

Hopkins Press, 1974). p. 248.

77. Catherine Marchak. "The Joy of Transgression: Bataille

University of Minnesota Press. 1981).

I

74. Ibid. p. 146.

56. Ibid, p. 291.

61. See Waller Ong. The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis:

.

73. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (BaJtimore: The Johns

76. Derrida. p. 248.

Hague: Maninus Nijhoff, 1971). pp. 187-88.

po

,

(

see Rosen, pp. 4-5.

55. Merteau·Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. p. 430. 57. R. M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodimell/. 2d I'd. (The

W

description of Alexander Kojeve' s posthistorical Utopia, pp. 91-107 and passim. 84. Brown, p. 127.

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