If infancy is to be something like a "faculty of enthusiasm," it is because it proceeds from a kind of yes. The child gives itself to the other, and indeed this giving takes a fabulous form, but in the fable there is a yes, a yes that echoes even among all the infantile "noes." [...] If it is possible to envision surviving the grounds for despair provided by this century (in sum, a spreading banality of evil in the face of multiple forms of devastation), it is because there survives in the mind an affirmative relation to non-being, and thus the capacity for opening to the event, for projecting upon an "Is it happening?" This is not a childlike optimism; the joy that is known in infancy cohabits with terror, if only the terror of the jouissance it has known. The "yes" is radically dispossessed; it opens, and it opens in, Jean-François says, a "desert" of desolation. (136)

—Christopher Fynsk, "Jean-François's Infancy," in Minima Memoria: In the Wake of Jean-François Lyotard, ed. Claire Nouvet, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Kent Still (Stanford UP, 2007)