no longer, but still: experience, archive, childhood

Abstract

Starting from a brief reading of Caravaggio’s painting The Cardsharps, the article begins by suggesting a theoretical platform for an analysis of the different regimes of time immanent in the experience of living and, more specifically, in its narrative apprehension. This is what is at stake in the play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad and Denis Villeneuve’s film based on it – Incendies – which chronicles the journey of discovery undertaken by the children of one Nawal Marwan, as they inherit the task of pulling together their mother’s personal history and, by extension, their own, making past and present confront and mingle with each other in the archival forge of their lives. The discussions focus not on a preservationist reappropriation of memory, but on the ingenious discontinuity of the archive, according to the meanings which have been conferred to it by Michel Foucault and Arlette Farge, paving the way for a perspective of education as a push into an open and always unstable space of trafficking between the extraordinary archive of the world and the vertiginous temporalities acting on and within it. As such, this paper concludes proposing an approach to childhood as potency for the discursive reinvention that the young are eventually able to accomplish by following the footprints that their elders have left behind.