childhood figures: inscriptions, circumscriptions and fires

Abstract

In this brief article, it is impossible to resist the temptation to write about duplicities and opposites. After all, we are discussing Fires, which, contrary to what is currently expected, is a story without a happy ending. Or even without an ending, maybe. In contrast with the contemporary figures of childhood, in Fires there is the presence of genealogies and their possibilities of freedom, centered in memory, pain, struggle and resistance. At the same time, these genealogies may be prisons of the imagination. There are mirages of freedom centered in feminine figures that are able to look, with eyes wide open. There is the word – hard and fragile – that presents itself in singing. There are silences to be deciphered (and respected) and there is, primarily, freedom through mastering of the word: learning to read, learning to write, learning to tell, learning to talk, learning to think. There is, as its opposite, the impossibility of putting into words, the inutility of learning to tell, learning to talk, learning to think. Beyond the big speeches, there is a proposal for deciphering small gestures, clues and enigmas. However, gathering inspiration from the concept of field of view and the idea of peripheral vision--understood as the capacity of an individual to see elements outside the center of gaze—I discuss in this paper the duplicitous childhoodhappiness-as-affected-by-liabilities discourse, and focus on some questions that arise from what I call a “discursive thunderstorm” concerning childhood, in particular the appeasement of memory, of pain, of fight, of resistance and of events. For this purpose, I analyze discussions about protection / child-care and their calculations based on liability ; the figures of children dealing with the contemporary shift from the idea of resistance to that of resiliency, as being the capacity to face adversity. I try to capture, in the meetingpoints of these discussions, the current rationality of our epoch, while recognizing that in fact there is nothing new, only reshufflings and movements that create effects in individuals.