give infancy to childhood. notes for a politics and poetics of time

Abstract

The following text aims to pose the question provoked by the of discrepancy between infancy as defined in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard and childhood per se, and to do so in the epochal context of an educational temporality governed by the attributes of acceleration, “profitable,” knowledge, cognitivism, rampant inequalities, an ethos of “success” at any cost, a univocal relationship between knowledge and utilitarianism, and a severe conflict between egalitarian organization and experience and the demand for performance. The loss of infancy in childhood is perhaps the loss of infancy in humanity, depriving it of free time, the possibility of fiction, creation, play, and art. The question that permeates the article is, what does it mean to listen to the voices of infancy in childhood? What is being articulated there? How might we appreciate those voices as a starting point for the reinvention of a different form of education? Our fundamental objective is to construct a politics and a poetics of time that, in their aesthetic and ethical expression, indicate the possibility of a different educational journey for children and childhood, based on the sense of the existence of a time for which it is never too late.