Abstract
My purpose in this chapter is to explore two types of events that expose children to peril. The first refers to a challenge that all infants and children face, namely the complexity of taking in the symbolic system of the world through encounter with the parental Other. This encounter works tolerably well most of the time, but, as I will illustrate, occlusions, foreclosures, and misrecognitions—which may be unconscious on the part of the parent—can greatly complicate the construction of subjectivity and the development of the “going on being” that Donald Winnicott noted as a marker in an infant of a sense of ease with the world. In extreme cases, as André Green noted, limitations on a child’s capacity for self-definition, agency, and creativity may be so straitened that a child may be “forbidden to be” and may fail to develop a capacity to think freely and give an account of themselves. The second type of precarity refers to children who experience misrecognition at the hands of sovereign authorities. A child may be placed in what Agamben calls a “state of exception” by virtue of their identity as a child who is indigenous, a refugee, orphaned by war or genocide, trafficked for child or sexual labor, a member of a caste, class, sexual, ethnic, racial, religious, or other out-group, or through growing up in a repressive or colonized society. Or, indeed, a child may grow up with parents or ancestors who have suffered such circumstances and may experience intergenerational sequelae of familial or collective suffering. Speaking of such affected groups, Leonor Arfuch noted that the “radical disparity of the gaze” ensures that “the other does not attain the status of the human”. My goal is to explicate the melancholic sequelae of malignant familial and societal events and to ponder what might enable a child to nurture a capacity for imagining self as agentic and creative or even as deserving of the right to exist. I will conclude by exploring the potential of notions of radical performativity, critical relationality, and mutual interdependence to redress this suffering.