Abstract
It could be said that the study of the child as a subject of discourse is in its infancy. With literary representations only arising in the last two hundred years and scientific discourse only giving focused treatment of the child in the last one hundred years, children seem to have had a marginal existence at best within the Western textual tradition. Peter Laslett’s familiar quote bears repeating: ‘these crowds and crowds of little children are strangely absent from the written record& There is something mysterious about the silence of all these multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and adolescents, in the statements men made at the time about their own experience’.2
There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all& (W)hat is philosophy today — philosophical activity, I mean — if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?
Michel Foucault1
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Notes
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. II, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) pp. 8–9.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, p. 104. Quoted in John Boswell’s, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) p. 6.
Joseph Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) pp. 2–3.
Two fine examples of this area of study are Lloyd de Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in Tire History of Childhood (London: Souvenir Press, 1976) pp. 1–73
Linda Pollock’s Forgotten Children: Parent-Child relations from 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). While de Mause stresses the discontinuity of the cruel treatment of children in the past compared with the modern experience, Pollock suggests a historical continuity in parental sentiment towards children.
John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books) pp. 26–7. Hereafter cited in text as (KS). Also, see, David Archard Children: Rights and Childhood (New York: Routledge, 1993) pp. 23–5.
Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p. 1.
Peter Coveney, Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature (London: Rockliff, 1957), p. ix.
Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) pp. 85, 89.
Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Lévinas (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1986) p. 19. Hereafter cited in text as (FF).
Lévinas, ‘Diachrony and Representation’, in Richard A. Cohen (trans.) Time and the Other (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987) p. 99ff.
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Lévinas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992) p. 4.
Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985) p. 60. Hereafter cited in text as (EI).
See also, Emmanuel Lévinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987) pp. 39ff. Hereafter cited in text as (TO).
Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds, Re-Reading Lévinas (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991) pp. 110–11. Hereafter cited in text as (RRL).
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Aiphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) p. 267. Hereafter cited in text as (77).
Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Aiphonso Lingis (The Hague, The Netherlands: Martin Nijhoff Publishers, 1981) 184–5. Hereafter cited in text as (OB).
John Llewelyn, The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighborhood of Lévinas, Heidegger and Others (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991) p. 55.
Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, trans. Richard A. Cohen, in Sean Hand (ed.), The Lévinas Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989) 179. Hereafter cited in text as (GP).
Steven G. Smith, The Argument To the Other: Reason Beyond Reason in the Thought of Karl Barth and Emmanuel Lévinas (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983) p. 170.
Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) p. 204.
Ibid., p. 205. Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘The Trace of the Other’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983) p. 358.
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) p. 195.
Benjamin Jowett (trans.), Irwin Edman (ed.), The Works of Plato (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928) p. 266.
John Boswell, ‘Expositio and Oblatio The Abandonment of Children and the Ancient and Medieval Family’, American Historical Review, LXXXIX (February 1984) 13.
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Teel, D.C. (1997). Excessive Children: Textual Filiation and the Command of the Other. In: Tsuchiya, K. (eds) Dissent and Marginality. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25936-6_10
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