Held in abusive custody by the laws of becoming, they hang on to your finger for dear life. (139)

—Avital Ronell, "On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard, Kid-Tested," in Minima Memoria, ed. Nouvet, Stahuljak, and Still

Baptisons-la infantia, ce qui ne se parle pas. Une enfance qui n'est pas un âge de la vie et qui ne se passe pas. Elle hante le discours. Celui-ci ne cesse pas de la mettre à l'écart. Mais il s'obstine, par là même, à la constituer, comme perdue. A son insu, il l'abrite donc. Elle est son reste. Si l'enfance demeure chez elle, ce n'est pas quoique mais parce qu'elle loge chez l'adulte. (9)

[Let us baptize that which does not speak infantia. A childhood that is not a phase of life and which does not pass. It haunts discourse. It {discourse} never ceases to set infancy apart, yet infancy persists, constituting it, as if lost. Unknowingly, then, {discourse} shelters infancy; infancy is its remainder. If infancy remains in its own place, it is not despite dwelling in the adult, but because of it.]

—Jean-François Lyotard, Preface, Lectures d'Enfance (Galilée, 1991; bootleg translation my own fault).

As soon as we attempt to talk about infancy we freeze it; we make it something that "loge chez l'adulte" and "qui ne se passe pas." Yet the fact that it passes is the defining condition of childhood. The state of infancy is all-confining, all-determining, inexorable, and is at the same time always slipping away, minute by minute: that's the point. It's temporary.

Temporariness is a difficult concept; therefore, so is childhood.

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)