2019 (#108) : Malaguzzi , Derrida , Winnicott

It is necessary to give an immediate response to a child. Children need to know that we are their friends, that they can depend on us for the things they desire, that we can support them in the things that they have, but also in the things that they dream about, that they desire.

(Malaguzzi)

If, the adult can manage to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making
claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding intermediate areas, and are pleased to find a degree of overlapping, that is to say common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy.

(Winnicott)

There would be more to say on the figure of the circle in Heidegger.
His treatment is not simple. It also implies a certain affirmation of the
circle, which is assumed. One should not necessarily flee or condemn
circularity as one would a bad repetition, a vicious circle, a regressive
or sterile process. One must, in a certain way of course, inhabit the
circle, turn around in it, live there a feast of thinking, and the gift, the
gift of thinking, would be no stranger there.

(Derrida)

2019 (#107) : Malaguzzi , Derrida

What we have to do now is draw out the image of the child, draw the child out of the desperate situations that many children find themselves in. If we redeem the child from these difficult situations, we redeem ourselves.

(Malaguzzi)

analysis as untangling, untying, detaching, freeing, even liberation — and thus also, let us not forget, as solution. The Greek word analuein, as is well known, means to untie and thus to dissolve the link. It can thus be rigorously approached, if not translated, by the Latin solvere (to detach, deliver, absolve, or acquit). Both solutio and resolutio have the sense of dissolution, dissolved tie, extrication, disengagement, or acquittal (for example, from debt) and that of solution of a problem: explanation or unveiling. The solutio linguae is also the tongue untied.

(Derrida)

2019 (#106) : Malaguzzi , Nietzsche , John Ashbery , Derrida

We must forge strong alliances with the families of our children. Imagine the school as an enormous hot air balloon. The hot air balloon is on the ground when the parents bring their children in the morning. Some parents think the balloon is going to rise up and fly around during the day. Others would really prefer that the balloon remain on the ground because that way they are sure their children are safe and protected. But the children want to go up and fly and travel everywhere in a hot air balloon, to see in this different way, to look at things from above. Our problem is that to make the hot air balloon fly we have to make sure that parents understand the importance of what the teachers and children are doing in the hot air balloon. Flying through the air, seeing the world in a different way, adds to the wealth of all of us, particularly the children.

(Malaguzzi)

To attain a height and bird’s eye view, so one grasps how
everything actually happens as it ought to happen; how every
kind of “imperfection” and the suffering to which it gives rise
are part of the highest desirability.

(Nietzsche)

For progress occurs through re-inventing
These words from a dim recollection of them,
In violating that space in such a way as
To leave it intact. Yet we do after all
Belong here, and have moved a considerable
Distance; our passing is a facade.
But our understanding of it is justified.

(John Ashbery)

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event
as question of the ghost. What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or
the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective,
virtual. insubstantial as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an opposition that holds up? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the Singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a
hauntology.

(Derrida)

2019 (#105) : Malaguzzi , Deleuze

We don’t want to teach children something that they can learn by themselves. We don’t want to give them thoughts that they can come up with by themselves. What we want to do is activate within children the desire and will and great pleasure that comes from being the authors of their own learning.

(Malaguzzi)

What does “innocence” mean? When Nietzsche denounces our
deplorable mania for accusing, for seeking out those responsible
outside, or even inside, ourselves, he bases this critique on five
grounds. The first of these is that “nothing exists outside of the
whole”. But the last and deepest is that “there is no whole”: “It is
necessary to disperse the universe, to lose respect for the whole. Innocence is the truth of multiplicity.It derives immediately from the principles of the philosophy of force and will. Every thing is
referred to a force capable of interpreting it; every force is referred to
what it is able to do, from which it is inseparable. It is this way of being
referred, of affirming and being affirmed, which is particularly innocent.

(Deleuze)

We need to know how to recognize a new presence, how to wait for the child. This is something that is learned, it’s not automatic. We often have to do it against our own rush to work in our own way. We’ll discover that our presence, which has to be visible and warm, makes it possible for us to try to get inside the child and what that child is doing. And this may seem to be passive, but it is really a very strong activity on our part.

(Malaguzzi)

Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential
transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the
affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being. The affirmation
of becoming is itself being, the affirmation of multiplicity is
itself one. Multiple affirmation is the way in which the one affirms
itself. “The one is the many, unity is multiplicity.” And indeed, how
would multiplicity come forth from unity and how would it continue
to come forth from it after an eternity of time if unity was not actually
affirmed in multiplicity? “If Heraclitus only perceives a single element
it is nevertheless, in a sense, diametrically opposed to that of
Parmenides (or of Anaximander). . . The unique must be affirmed in
generation and destruction.” Heraclitus had taken a deep look, he had
seen no chastisement of multiplicity, no expiation of becoming, no
culpability of existence. He saw no negativity in becoming, he saw
precisely the opposite: the double affirmation of becoming and of the
being of becoming – in short the justification of being. Heraclitus is
obscure because he leads us to the threshold of the obscure: what is the
being of becoming? What is the being inseparable from that which is
becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes. Return is the being
of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming. The
eternal return as law of becoming, as justice and as being.

(Deleuze)

2019 (#104) : Malaguzzi , Emerson , Nietzsche , Derrida

Both children and adults need to feel active and important — to be rewarded by their own efforts, their own intelligences, their own activity and energy. When a child feels these things are valued, they become a fountain of strength for him. He feels the joy of working with adults who value his work and this is one of the bases for learning.

(Malaguzzi)

When I watch that flowing river which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

(Emerson)

Overactivity on the part of the adult is a risk factor. The adult does too much because he cares about the child; but this creates a passive role for the child in her own learning.

(Malaguzzi)

Indicating the power and confidence obtained by showing that ‘I’ve unlearned fear’; in place of mistrust and doubt, trust our instincts; each person loving and honoring himself or herself in wisdom and even absurdity; partly as a fool, partly as a god; not being a figure of woe or an owl; or a serpent . . .

(Nietzsche)

All of this is a great forest. Inside the forest is the child. The forest is beautiful, fascinating, green, and full of hopes; there are no paths. Although it isn’t easy, we have to make our own paths, as teachers and children and families, in the forest. Sometimes we find ourselves together within the forest, sometimes we may get lost from each other, sometimes we’ll greet each other from far away across the forest; but it’s living together in this forest that is important. And this living together is not easy.

(Malaguzzi)

. . no matter how it happened, each time “the hero” strode across the stage,
something new was attained, a terrible reverse of laughter, a profound emotion for many in their thought: “Yes, life is worth living! Yes, I’m worthy of life!”-Life, you and me, all of us just as we are, we became interesting to ourselves. We cannot deny that in the long run laughter, reason, and nature ended up becoming masters of each of the great masters of teleology: Brief-tenured tragedy finally has always returned to the eternal comedy of existence. And the sea “with its countless smiles”–to speak with Aeschylus–with its waves, will finally cover the greatest of our tragedies. . .

(Nietzsche)

We have to find each other in the forest and begin to discuss what the education of the child actually means. The important aspect is not just to promote the education of the child but the health and happiness of the child as well.

(Malaguzzi)

To repeat: the hymen, the confusion between the present and the
nonpresent, along with all the indifferences it entails within the whole
series of opposites (perception/nonperception, memory/image, memory/
desire, etc.), produces the effect of a medium (a medium as element
enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between the two terms).
It is an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands
between the opposites “at once. ” What counts here is the between, the
in-between-ness of the hymen. The hymen “takes place” in the “inter-,” in
the spacing between desire and fulfillment, between perpetration and its
recollection. But this medium of the entre has nothing to do with a center.

(Derrida)

We need to think of the school as a living organism. Children have to feel that the world is inside the school and moves and thinks and works and reflects on everything that goes on. Of course not all children are the same — each child brings a part of something that’s different into the school.

(Malaguzzi)

I live–if I choose to see things this way–among a curious race that sees earth, its chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, and insects not so much in relation to themselves–or the necessities limiting them–but in relation to the unlimited, lost, and unintelligible aspect of the skies.

(Nietzsche)

All of this pushes us to produce a higher level of observation. We must move beyond just looking at the child to become better observers, able to penetratinto the child to understand each child’s resources and potential and present state of mind. We need to compare these with our own in order to work well together.

(Malaguzzi)

When we have rounded a certain corner in our reading, we will
place ourselves on that side of the lustre where the “medium” is shining.

(Derrida)

2019 (#103) : Malaguzzi , Derrida , William Blake , Jung , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Rumi

There are hundreds of different images of the child. Each one of you has inside yourself an image of the child that directs you as you begin to relate to a child. This theory within you pushes you to behave in certain ways; it orients you as you talk to the child, listen to the child, observe the child. It is very difficult for you to act contrary to this internal image. For example, if your image is that boys and girls are very different from one another, you will behave differently in your interactions with each of them.

(Malaguzzi)

‘Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word? I have begun
to answer this question. But this question is such, and such the nature of
my answer, that the place of the one and of the other must constantly be
in movement. If words and concepts receive meaning only in sequences of
differences, one can justify one’s language, and one’s choice of terms, only
within a topic [an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The
justification can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds
to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation. Thus, over
and above those that I have already defined, a certain number of givens
belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively imposed this
choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself to a certain number
of contemporary discourses whose force I intend to take into account. Not
that I accept them totally. But the word trace establishes the clearest connections
with them and thus permits me to dispense with certain developments
which have already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields.
(Derrida)

The Web of Life is woven & the tender sinews of life created …
(William Blake)

The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child. There’s a difference between the environment that you are able to build based on a preconceived image of the child and the environment that you can build that is based on the child you see in front of you — the relationship you build with the child, the games you play. An environment that grows out of your relationship with the child is unique and fluid.

(Malaguzzi)

To learn to live: a strange watchword. Who would learn? From
whom? To teach to live, but to whom? Will we ever know? Will
we ever know how to live and first of all what “to learn to live”
means? And why “finally”
By itself, out of context-but a context, always, remains open,
thus fallible and insufficient-this watchword forms an almost
unintelligible syntagm. Just how far can its idiom be translated
moreover?
(Derrida)

When you begin working with children in the morning, you must, as adults, pose questions about the children, such as: “When are these children really going to begin socializing?” And at the same time the children will pose questions to the adults: “When are the adults really going to begin socializing?” This is a dialogue that needs to be continual between the adults and the children. The adults ask questions from the world of adults to the children. The children will ask questions to the adults. The expectations that the children have of the adults and the adults have of the children are important. We must spend some time talking about these expectations.

(Malaguzzi)

To gratify senses unknown? trees, beasts and birds unknown;
Unknown, not unperciev’d, spread in the infinite microscope,
In places yet univisited by the voyager, and in worlds
Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown
(William Blake)

we must perforce consider first the myths of the Near and Middle East that underlie Christianity … the motive force that produces these configurations cannot be distinguished from the transconscious factor known as instinct.
(Jung)

The world came out of an egg. More precisely,
the living creator of the life of the world came out of an egg: the sun, then,
was at first carried in an eggshell. Which explains a number of Ammon Ra’s
characteristics: he is also a bird, a falcon (“I am the great falcon,
hatched from his egg”). But in his capacity as origin of everything,
Ammon-Ra is also the origin of the egg. He is designated sometimes as the
bird-sun born from the primal egg, sometimes as the originary bird, carrier
of the first egg
(Derrida)

I will arise, Explore these dens, & find that deep pulsation
(William Blake)

We can never think of the child in the abstract. When we think about a child, when we pull out a child to look at, that child is already tightly connected and linked to a certain reality of the world — she has relationships and experiences. We cannot separate this child from a particular reality.She brings these experiences, feelings, and relationships into school with her. And it is the same for you as adults. When you enter the school in the morning, you carry with you pieces of your life — your happiness, your sadness, your hopes, your pleasures, the stresses from your life. You never come in an isolated way; you always come with pieces of the world attached to you.
(Malaguzzi)

To live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.
(Derrida)

Of course, many things that happen in school can be seen ahead and planned beforehand. But many things that happen cannot be known ahead of time. Something will start to grow inside the child and suddenly what is happening in the school will move in that direction. Sometimes what happens starts inside the adults. School can never be always predictable. We need to be open to what takes place and able to change our plans and go with what might grow at that very moment both inside the child and inside ourselves.
(Malaguzzi)

When you are giddy, you see the world running circles round you. Obsessed with the idea of means and end, of work and purpose, you see me apparently functioning. In reality I only look. Whatever is done, is done on the stage. Joy and sorrow life and death, they all are real to the man in bondage; to me they are all in the show, as unreal as the show itself.I may perceive the world just like you, but you believe to be in it, while I see it as an iridescent drop in the vast expanse of consciousness.

(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Each one of us needs to be able to play with the things that are coming out of the world of children. Each one of us needs to have curiosity, and we need to be able to try something new based on the ideas that we collect from the children as they go along. Life has to be somewhat agitated and upset, a bit restless, somewhat unknown. As life flows with the thoughts of the children, we need to be open, we need to change our ideas; we need to be comfortable with the restless nature of life.

(Malaguzzi)

the infinitely small point of meaning which the languages barely brush … What can an infinitely small point of meaning be? What is the measure to evaluate it? The metaphor itself is at once the question and the answer.

(Derrida)

All of this changes the role of the teacher, a role that becomes much more difficult and complex. It also makes the world of the teacher more beautiful, something to become involved in.

(Malaguzzi)

Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to
which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them. Within
the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking
falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to
surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse-to
mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and
to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose
deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice
through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be
glimpsed.

(Derrida)

keep silence
don’t rush to finish your poem
the finisher of the poem
the creator of the word
will begin to arrive
(Rumi)

2019 (#102): Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Derrida

They tell the child: to discover the world already there and of the hundred they steal ninety-nine. They tell the child: that work and play reality and fantasy science and imagination sky and earth reason and dream are things that do not belong together. And thus they tell the child that the hundred is not there. The child says: No way. The hundred is there.

(Malaguzzi)

Psychoanalysis itself is viewed as having the purpose of making life easy-but this is not what . its founder intended. Psychoanalysis was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. Freud’s prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man .. – – succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.

This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is un- avoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence-but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hard- ships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.

Modern stories written for young children mainly avoid these exis- tential problems, although they are crucial issues for all of us. The child needs most particularly to be given suggestions in symbolic form about how he may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity. “Safe” stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by con- trast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predica- ments.

(Bettelheim)

I don’t think it would be serious to reduce all the work in which I’ve been involved under the name of “deconstruction,” since you’ve alluded to this, to reduce it to something to be explained by the “After Auschwitz.” I believe this would be neither right nor serious. Still, to an extent, I believe that this work, as I have undertaken it or as it has imposed it self upon me, would not have had the same form or the same urgency had the great issues of Western rationality, of Western philosophy, of the Western metaphysics of Europe, not been somehow called into question, first by twentieth century totalitarianism, but more uniquely by something like the Holocaust. Obviously, trying to think the Holocaust is a difficult task, which assumes at least asking oneself how Western culture, dominated by what is called philosophy, by Judeo-Christian traditions, etc., could have made possible, or not have made impossible, an event such as the one named Auschwitz or the Shoah.

Naturally, at the same time, I must recognize, like others, but in a particularly acute manner, that I have had many problems in naming this thing. The idea of the name to be given to what is called for the sake of convenience: Shoah, Holocaust, Auschwitz. For me the question of the name, that is of the singularity of this event, has always remained suspended, open, has always been a matter for debates, even disagreements with many of my contemporaries, contemporary philosophers. We shall undoubtedly return to this: I believe that this event is unique in a certain sense. But what does the word ‘unique’ mean in this case? Any event is unique, any crime is unique, any death is unique. So what would constitute the singular uniqueness of the Shoah? This for me is a topic of anxious reflection, also of debates with many other philosophers. This question is not closed; I see it, even today, being launched again in a new way, notably in France.

(Derrida)

2019 (#101) : Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Derrida — “capacity for many different roles … author of a play … creates the environment … audience who applauds … invent new words … find meaning … irrational beginnings … understand himself better … the experience of a deconstruction … responsibility … not deaf to the injunction of thought”

When we in Reggio say children have 100 languages, we mean more than the 100 languages of children, we also mean the 100 languages of adults, of teachers. The teacher must have the capacity for many different roles. The teacher has to be the author of a play, someone who thinks ahead of time. Teachers also need to be the main actors in the play, the protagonists. The teacher must forget all the lines he knew before and invent the ones he doesn’t remember. Teachers also have to take the role of the prompter, the one who gives the cues to the actors. Teachers need to be set designers who create the environment in which activities take place. At the same time, the teacher needs to be the audience who applauds.

The teacher has many different roles and she needs to be in many places and do many different things and use many languages. Sometimes the teacher will find himself without words, without anything to say; and at times this is fortunate for the child, because then the teacher will have to invent new words.

(Malaguzzi)

If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most diffi- cult achievement is to find meaning in our lives. It is well known how many have lost the will to live, and have stopped trying, because such meaning has evaded them. An understanding of the meaning of one’s life is not suddenly acquired at a particular age, not even when one has reached chronological maturity. On the contrary, gaining a secure understanding of what the meaning of one’s life may or ought to be -this is what constitutes having attained psychological maturity. And this achievement is the end result of a long development: at each age we seek, and must be able to find, some modicum of meaning congru- ent with how our minds and understanding have already developed.

Contrary to the ancient myth, wisdom does not burst forth fully developed like Athena out of Zeus’s head; it is built up, small step by small step, from most irrational beginnings. Only in adulthood can an intelligent understanding of the meaning of one’s existence in this world be gained from one’s experiences in it. Unfortunately, too many parents want their children’s minds to function as their own do-as if mature understanding of ourselves and the world, and our ideas about the meaning of life, did not have to develop as slowly as our bodies and minds.

Today, as in times past, the most important and also the most diffi- cult task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in life. Many growth experiences are needed to achieve this. The child, as he devel- ops, must learn step by step to understand himself better; with this he becomes more able to understand others, and eventually can relate to them in ways which are mutually satisfying and meaningful.

(Bettelheim)

What troubles me is what also commands me; it involves the necessity of locating, wherever one responds to the question “who?” – not only in terms of the subject, but also in terms of Dasein – conceptual oppositions which have not yet been sufficiently questioned, not even by Heidegger. I referred to this a moment ago and this is what I have been aiming at in all my analyses of Heidegger. [9] In order to recast, if not rigorously re-found a discourse on the “subject”, on that which will hold the place (or  replace the place) of the subject (of law, of morality, of politics – so many categories caught up in the same turbulence) one has to go through the experience of a deconstruction. This deconstruction (we should once again remind those who do not want to read) is not negative, nor nihilistic; it is not even a pious nihilism, as I have heard said. A concept (that is to say also an experience) of responsibility comes at this price. We have not finished paying for it. I am talking about a responsibility which is not deaf to the injunction of thought. As you said one day; there is a duty in deconstruction. There has to be, if there is such a thing as duty. The subject, if subject there must be, is to come after this.

(Derrida)

2019 (#100) : Malaguzzi , Derrida , Lacoue-Labarthe , Freud — “the child wants to know that she is observed, carefully, with full attention … the processes are important … opening a window and getting a fresh view of things … the child wants to be observed … carries you into many different feelings and thoughts … what might link metaphysics and grammar … the decentering of the subject … the distribution of the positions of the unconscious … ‘the content of the unconscious is collective’ …”

What the child doesn’t want is an observation from the adult who isn’t really there, who is distracted. The child wants to know that she is observed, carefully, with full attention. The child wants to be observed in action. She wants the teacher to see the process of her work, rather than the product. The teacher asks the child to take a bucket of water from one place to the other. It’s not important to the child that the teacher only sees him arrive with the bucket of water at the end. What is important to the child is that the teacher sees the child while the child is working, while the child is putting out the effort to accomplish the task — the processes are important, how much the child is putting into the effort, how heroic the child is doing this work. What children want is to be observed while engaged, they do not want the focus of the observation to be on the final product. When we as adults are able to see the children in the process, it’s as if we are opening a window and getting a fresh view of things.

“If only you had seen all I had to do.” The child wants this observation. We all want this. This means that when you learn to observe the child, when you have assimilated all that it means to observe the child, you learn many things that are not in books — educational or psychological. And when you have done this you will learn to have more diffidence and more distrust of rapid assessments, tests, judgments. The child wants to be observed, but she doesn’t want to be judged. Even when we do judge, things escape us, we do not see things, so we are not able to evaluate in a wide way. This system of observing children carries you into many different feelings and thoughts, into a kind of teaching full of uncertainty and doubt, and it takes wisdom and a great deal of knowledge on the part of the teachers to be able to work within this situation of uncertainty.

(Malaguzzi)

Still on a preliminary level, let’s not forget Nietzsche’s precautions regarding what  might link metaphysics and grammar. These precautions need to be duly adjusted and problematized, but they remain necessary. What we are seeking with the question “who?” perhaps no longer stems from grammar, from a relative or interrogative pronoun  which always refers back to the grammatical function of subject. How can we get away from this contract between the grammar of the subject or the substantive and the ontology of substance or the subject? The different singularity which I named perhaps does not even correspond to the grammatical form “who” in a sentence where in “who”  is the subject of a verb coming after the subject, etc. On the other hand, if Freudian thought has been consequential in the decentering of the subject we have been talking about so much these last years, is the “ego”, in the elements of the topic or in the  distribution of the positions of the unconscious, the only answer to the question “who”?  And if so, what would be the consequences of this?

(Derrida)

At its extreme, the question of identity is, for Freud, the question of the identity of a dissociation.
That means, first of all (and this will be our point of departure), that the question of identity implicates and cuts into the identity of psychoanalysis itself. It is here, at least in its theoretical identity, that psychoanalysis vacillates and overflows: as we have seen, neither the path of speculation, nor that of a presumptive “application”, permit it to overtake its fundamental presupposition, the subject or the psyche. This, in any case, is what psychoanalysis itself admits when, pressed by the question of origin, it must “bridge the gulf” recognized by Freud between the individual and the species (or between individual and group psychology) and discover or decree that “the content of the unconscious” is “in any case… collective” (the phrase is in Moses and Monotheism). Freud’s interest in social or cultural phenomena is, therefore, neither secondary nor derived; nor is it a youthful “curiosity” which the aging Freud, having completed his theoretical construction, would amateurishly assuage. Psychoanalysis, at its very ground-as a science of the subject-is in reality a sociology and an ethnology (and consequently, no doubt, a “politology”). But the ground itself slips away; that is why psychoanalysis vacillates.

(Lacoue-Labarthe)

In myths about the birth of heroes-to which Otto Rank [1909] has devoted a study… a predominant part is played by exposure in the water and rescue from the water. Rank has perceived that these are representations of birth, analogous to those that are usually in dreams… In myths a person who rescues a baby from the water is admitting that she is the baby’s true mother. There is a well-known comic anecdote according to which an intelligent Jewish boy was asked who the mother of Moses was. He replied without hesitation: “The Princess”. No, he was told, “she only took him out of the water”. “That’s what she says”, he replied, and so proved that he had found the correct interpretation of the myth.

(Freud)

2019 (#99) : Malaguzzi , Derrida — “the adult is there, attentive and helpful … clarifying the meaning of our presence … observing in many different ways … transform it … understand it in a new way … it overflows the question itself … ‘yes’ … ‘affirmation’ … acquiescing to language … ‘yes,yes'”

It’s a constant value for the children to know that the adult is there, attentive and helpful, a guide for the child. Perhaps this way of working with the child will build a different understanding of our role than we have had before. Clarifying the meaning of our presence and our being with children is something that is vital for the child. When the child sees that the adult is there, totally involved with the child, the child doesn’t forget. This is something that’s right for us and it’s right for the children.

There are many things that are part of a child’s life just as they are part of an adult’s life. The desire to do something for someone, for instance. Every adult has a need to feel that we are seen/observed by others. (Observing others is also important.) This is just as true for children as for adults.

Therefore, it’s possible to observe, to receive a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from observing in many different ways. When the child is observed, the child is happy — it’s almost an honor that he is observed by an adult. On the other hand, a good teacher who knows how to observe feels good about himself because that person knows that he is able to take something from the situation, transform it, and understand it in a new way.

(Malaguzzi)

Let’s go back a little and start out again from the question “who?” (I note first of all in  passing that to substitute a very indeterminate “who” for a “subject” overburdened with metaphysical determinations is perhaps not enough to bring about any decisive displacement. In the expression the “question ‘who’?”, the emphasis might well later on  fall on the word “question”. Not only in order to ask who asks the question or on the subject of whom the question is asked (so much syntax which decides the answer in advance), but to ask if there is a subject, no, a “who” before being able to ask questions  about it. I don’t yet know who can ask himself this nor how. But one can already see several possibilities opening up: the “who” might be there before and as the power to  ask questions (this, in the end, is how Heidegger identifies the Dasein and comes to choose it as the exemplary guiding thread in the question of Being) or else it might be, and this comes down to the same thing, that which is made possible by the power (by being able to) ask questions about itself (who is who? who is it?). But there is another possibility which interests me more at this point: it overflows the question itself, reinscribes it in the experience of an “affirmation”, of a “yes” or of an “en-gage” (this is the  word I use in De l’esprit to describe Zusage, that acquiescing to language, to the mark, which the most primordial question implies), that “yes, yes” [1] which answers before even being able to formulate a question, which is responsible without autonomy, before and in view of all possible autonomy of the who-subject, etc. The relation to self, in this situation, can only be différance, that is to say alterity, or trace. Not only is the obligation not lessened in this, but on the contrary it finds in it its only possibility, which is neither subjective nor human. Which doesn’t mean that it is inhuman or without subject, but that it is from this dislocated affirmation (thus without “firmness” nor  “c1osedness”) that something like the subject, man, or whoever it might be can take  shape. I now close this long parenthesis).

(Derrida)