Childhood

I would like to write a few lines on the notion of childhood in Blanchot.

In The Step Not Beyond, Blanchot evokes the cries of children playing in the garden, evoking: a muffled call, “a call nevertheless joyful, the cry of children playing in the garden: ‘who is me today?’ ‘who holds the place of me?’ and the answer, joyful, infinite: him, him, him [il, il, il]’. As he comments in a later essay, ‘Who?’ in which he cites his own passage: ‘only children can create a counting rhyme [comptine] that opens up to impossibility and only children can sing of it happily’. Only children, then, could make a game of the ordeal of the self in which what one might call exposition occurs.

But the game and the children are themselves figures; if, as Blanchot writes, ‘all words are adult’, it is not because children would speak in a way that is absolutely pure or absolutely true. The child is itself a figure of the ‘il’, of the locus of the ‘he’ or ‘it’ that, as it were, says itself over again without ever lapsing into self-coincidence. It is the play of the ‘il’, of exposition, the neuter, always in default, to which the figure of the child refers.

In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot relates the story of the son of the camp Lagerführer feared lost among the children of the camps who was made to wear a placard in order to prevent the chance of a terrible substitution:

At ten years old, he sometimes came to fetch his father at the camp. One day, he couldn’t be found, and right away his father thought: he’s gotten swept up by mistake and thrown with the others into the gas chamber. But the child had only been hiding, and thereafter he was made to wear a placard for identification purposes.

This fragment is the emblem of the fixity of relations, of an ordering and mastery that absolutizes the power of the subject – of what, perhaps, one might think under the heading of adulthood. The identificatory placard, the insistence on retaining a proper name which indicates filiation and race, prevents the child being caught up in affliction. If it is childhood in its infinite substitutability that is a figure for exposition – the neuter as the placeholder that is itself without place – the relationship between SS and prisoners in the camps is the refusal of childhood.

One can see then when he writes, as he does in ‘Who?’, ‘let us be these children’, Blanchot asks us to welcome a certain experience of substitution without arresting it or determining its form. In so doing, he asks, in the name of our childhood, our secret neutrality, to articulate a responsibility that would answer to events – horrible and joyful – in which exposition is at play. This is the chance of ethics, which is to say, of answering to the substitution which occurs in our opening, our greeting to the other person.