2019 (#124) : Malaguzzi , Lacan , Bettelheim , Gandini , Vygotsky , Winnicott , Derrida

It is also important for the teachers to enjoy being with the other teachers, to enjoy seeing the children stretch their capacities and use their intelligences, to enjoy interactions with the children. Both parts are essential.

(Malaguzzi)

Man’s very desire is constituted, he tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognized. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example, his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labor. This dialectic, which is that of man’s very being, must bring about, through a series of crises, the synthesis of his particularity and his universality, going so far as to universalize this very particularity.

(Lacan)

The fairy tale … is very much the result of common conscious and
unconscious content having been shaped by the conscious mind, not
of one particular person, but the consensus of many in regard to
what they view as universal human problems, and what they accept
as desirable solutions. If all these elements were not present in a
fairy tale, it would not be retold by generation after generation.

(Bettelheim)

Making Learning Visible is the title of a book that reports careful and instructive research conducted jointly by educators in Reggio Emilia and researchers from Project Zero at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Making learning visible is the process of documentation and assessment that takes place during experiences conducted by teachers and
children together. Documentation truly makes visible how teachers and children construct learning together through strategies that are in harmony with children’s interests and teachers’ shared intentions.

(Gandini)

Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people…, and then within the child. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.

(Vygotsky)

In this squiggle
game I make some kind of an impulsive line-drawing and
invite the child whom I am interviewing to turn it into
something, and then he makes a squiggle for me to turn
into something in my turn.

(Winnicott)

Without either showing or hiding herself. This is what took place. She had
already taken her place “docilely,” without initiating the slightest activity,
according to the most gentle passivity, and she neither shows nor hides herself.
The possibility of this impossibility derails and shatters all unity, and
this is love; it disorganizes all studied discourses, all theoretical systems
and philosophies. They must decide between presence and absence, here
and there, what reveals and what conceals itself.

(Derrida)

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.

(Derrida)

The ability to enjoy relationships and work together is very important. Children need to enjoy being in school, they need to love their school and the interac

2019 (#123) : Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Winnicott , Lacan , Derrida , Nietzsche , Baudrillard , Sri Ramana Maharshi

Creativity requires that the school of knowing finds connections with the school of expressing, opening doors (this is our slogan) to the hundred languages of children.

(Malaguzzi)

In childhood, more than in any other age, all is becoming. As long
as we have not achieved considerable security within ourselves, we
cannot engage in difficult psychological struggles unless a positive
outcome seems certain to us, whatever the chances for this may be
in reality. The fairy tale offers fantasy materials which suggest to the
child in symbolic form what the battle to achieve self-realisation is all
about, and guarantees a happy ending. … the central figure of the
fairy tale lives happily ever after on earth, right among the rest of
us. Some fairy tales conclude with the information that if perchance
he has not died, the hero may still be alive. Thus, a happy though
ordinary existence is projected by fairy tales as the outcome of the
trials and tribulations involved in the normal growing-up process.

(Bettelheim)

This is preliminary to the task of weaning, and it also continues as one of the tasks of parents and educators. In other words, this matter of illusion is one that belongs inherently to human beings and that no individual finally solves for himself or herself, although a theoretical understanding of it may provide a
theoretical solution.

(Winnicott)

A subject’s history develops in a more or less typical series o£ ideal identifications that represent the purest of psychical phenomena in that they essentially reveal the function of imagos. I do not conceptualize the ego otherwise than as a central system of these formations, a system that one must understand, like these formations, in its imaginary structure and libidinal value.

(Lacan)

In their form and in their grammar, these questions are all turned toward the past: they ask if we already have at our disposal such a concept and if we have ever had any assurance in this regard. To have a concept at one’s disposal, to have assurances with regard to it, this presupposes a closed heritage and the guarantee which is sealed, in some sense, by this heritage. And the word and the notion of the archive seem at first, admittedly, to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition. If we have attempted to underline the past in these questions from the outset, it is also to indicate the direction of another problematic. As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future.

(Derrida)

The fictitious world of subject, substance, “reason,” etc., is
needed-: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially
distinguish. “Truth” is the will to be master over the
multiplicity of sensations:-to classify phenomena into definite
categories. In this we start from a belief in the “in-itself” of things
(we take phenomena as real).

(Nietzsche)

This condensation of history, of language, of the encyclopedia, remains here indissociable from an absolutely singular event, an absolutely singular signature, and therefore also of a date, of a language, of an autobiographical inscription. In a minimal autobiographical trait can be gathered the greatest potentiality of historical, theoretical, linguistic, philosophical culture — that’s really what interests me.

(Derrida)

Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: “l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented.” Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination – the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

(Baudrillard)

Whatever you experience, you should never rest content
with it. Whether you feel pleasure or fear, ask yourself who feels
it and continue your efforts until both pleasure and fear are
transcended and all duality ceases and the Reality alone remains.
There is nothing wrong in such things being experienced, but
you must never stop at that. For instance you must never rest
content with the pleasure of laya (dissolution) experienced when
thought is quelled but must press on until all duality ceases.

(Sri Ramana Maharshi)

2019 (#122) :Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Nietzsche , Heidegger , Taittireeya-Upanishad Book 2

Creativity seems to find its power when adults are less tied to prescriptive methods, but instead become observers and interpreters of problematic situations.

Creativity seems to be favored or disfavored according to the expectation of the teachers, schools, families, and communities as well as society at large according to the ways children perceive those expectations.

Creativity becomes more visible when adults try to be more attentive to the cognitive processes of children than to the results they achieve in various fields of doing and understanding.

(Malaguzzi

In a fairy tale, internal processes are externalised and become
comprehensible as represented by the figures of the story and its
events. … the paramount importance of fairy tales for the growing
individual resides in something other than teachings about correct
ways of behaving in this world – such wisdom is plentifully supplied in
religion, myths, and fables. Fairy stories do not pretend to describe
the world as it is, nor do they advise what one ought to do.

(Bettelheim)

Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation.
The “subject” is not something given, it is something added
and invented and projected behind what there is.- Finally, is it
necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even
this is invention, hypothesis.

(Nietzsche)

To acknowledge and respect consists in
letting every thinker’s thought come to us as something in
each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible–and
being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his
thought. Wbat is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a
lack inherent in his thought. What is un-thought is there in
each case only as the un-thought. The more original the
thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The
unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.

(Heidegger)

Tbe assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary;
perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects,
whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought
and our consciousuess in general? A kind of aristocracy of “cells”
in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals,
used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command?
My hypotheses: The subject as multiplicity.
Pain intellectual and dependent upon the judgment “harmful”:
projected.The effect always “unconscious”: the inferred and imagined
cause is projected, follows in time.

(Nietzsche)

God thought: ‘I would be many; I will procreate.’ And in the heat of his meditation created everything; creating everything He entered into everything; entering into everything He took shape yet remained shapeless; took limits yet remained limitless; made his home, yet remained homeless; created knowledge and ignorance; reality, unreality; became everything; therefore everything is reality.

(Taittireeya-Upanishad Book 2)

2019 (#121) : Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Heidegger , Derrida , Lacan , Sri Ramana Maharshi , Nietzsche

The most favorable situation for creativity seems to be interpersonal exchange, with negotiation of conflict and comparison of ideas and actions being decisive elements.

(Malaguzzi)

In order not to be at the mercy of the vagaries of life, one must
develop one’s inner resources, so that one’s emotions, imagination,
and intellect mutually support and enrich one another. … nothing is
more important than the impact of parents and others who take care
of the child; second in importance is our cultural heritage, when
transmitted to the child in the right manner. When children are
young, it is literature that carries such information best. … For a story
to hold a child’s attention, it must entertain him and arouse his
curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help
him to develop his intellect and clarify his emotions; be attuned to his
anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while
at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb
him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects
of his personality – and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary,
giving full credence to the seriousness of the child’s predicaments,
while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his
future.

(Bettelheim)

People still hold the view that what is handed down
to us by tradition is what in reality lies behind us-while
in fact it comes toward us because we are its captives
and destined to it. The purely historical view of tradition
and the course of history is one of those vast self-deceptions
in which we must remain entangled as long as we are still
not really thinking. That self-deception about history prevents
us from hearing the language of the thinkers. We
do not hear it rightly, because we take that language to be
mere expression, setting forth philosophers’ views. But the
thinkers’ language tells what is. To hear it is in no case
easy. Hearing it presupposes that we meet a certain requirement,
and we do so only on rare occasions. We must acknowledge
and respect it. To acknowledge and respect consists in
letting every thinker’s thought come to us as something in
each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible–and
being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his
thought. What is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a
lack inherent in his thought. What is un-thought is there in
each case only as the un-thought. The more original the
thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The
unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.

(Heidegger)

Another suggestion: This spectral someone other looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion.

(Derrida)

Who, if not us, will call back into question the objective status of this “I,” which a historical evolution peculiar to our culture tends to confuse with the subject? The specific impact of this anomaly on every level of language deserves to be displayed, and first and foremost as regards the first person as grammatical subject in our languages [langues]—the “I love” that hypostasizes a tendency in a subject who denies it. An impossible mirage in linguistic forms, among which the most ancient are to be found, and in which the subject appears fundamentally in the position of a determinative or instrumental of the action.

(Lacan)

The Self is all. Are you apart from the Self? Or can the work go on without the Self? The Self is universal so all actions will go on whether you strain yourself to be engaged in them or not.
–
The work will go on of itself. Thus Krishna told Arjuna that he need not trouble to kill the Kauravas because they were already slain by God. It was not for him to resolve to work and worry himself about it, but to allow his own nature to carry out the will of the higher power.
–
(Sri Ramana Maharshi)

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)

2019 (#120) : Malaguzzi , Derrida , Marie-Louise Von Franz , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Lacan , Nietzsche

Creativity seems to express itself through cognitive, affective, and imaginative processes. These come together and support the skills for predicting and arriving at unexpected solutions.

(Malaguzzi)

I would be tempted to say that paralysis is the negative symptom of
aporia. Paralysis arrests, whereas aporia, at least as I interpret it (the possibility of the impossible, the “play” of a certain excess in relation to any
mechanical movement, oriented process, path traced in advance, or teleological
program), would be the very condition of the step [pas] , or even
of the experience of pathbreaking, route (via rupta), march [marche] , decision,
event: the coming of the other, in sum, of writing and desire.

(Derrida)

Jung said that to be in a situation where there is no way out or to be in a conflict where there is no solution is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution; the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realize that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. . . If he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally, because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God.”

(Marie-Louise von Franz)

If it-learning to live-remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the “two’s” one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost. So it would be necessary to learn spirits. Even and especially if this,
the spectral, is not. Even and especially if this, which is neither substance, nor essence, nor existence, is never present as such.

(Derrida)

Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life I mean acceptance — letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not. You are the ultimate potentiality of which the all-embracing consciousness is the manifestation and expression.

(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Only a subject can understand a meaning; conversely, every meaning phenomenon implies a subject. In analysis, a subject presents himself as capable of being understood and is, in effect; introspection and supposedly projective intuition are not the a priori vitiations that psychology, taking its first steps along the path of science, believed to be irreducible. This would be to create an impasse out of moments that are abstractly isolated from a dialogue, whereas one should instead trust in its movement: it was to Freud’s credit that he assumed the risks involved before overcoming them by means of a rigorous technique.

(Lacan)

A full and powerful soul not only copes with painful, even
terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, insults; it emerges from
such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness; and, most
essential of all, with a new increase in the blissfulness of love. I
believe that he who has divined something of the most basic
conditions for this growth in love will understand what Dante
meant when he wrote over the gate of his Inferno: “I, too, was
created by eternal love.

(Nietzsche)

2019 (#119) : Malaguzzi , Winnicott , Lacan , Nietzsche , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Derrida

As we have chosen to work with children we can say that they are the best evaluators and the most sensitive judges of the values of creativity. This comes about because they have the privilege of not being excessively attached to their own ideas, which they construct and reinvent continuously. They are apt to explore, make discoveries, change their points of view, and fall in love with forms and meanings that transform themselves.

(Malaguzzi)

I hope it will be understood that I am not referring
exactly to the little child’s teddy bear or to the infant’s first
use of the fist (thumb, fingers). I am not specifically
studying the first object of object-relationships. I am
concerned with the first possession, and with the
intermediate area between the subjective and that which is
objectively perceived.

(Winnicott)

It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes [assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, “imago.”

The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infant stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the /is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

(Lacan)

Continual transition forbids us to speak of “individuals,” etc;
the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would know nothing
of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we
see what is at “rest” beside what is in motioll. The same applies
to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of
“empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception
of space. The principle of identity has behind it the
“apparent fact” of things that are the same. A world in a state
of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or
“known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing”
intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated
out of mere appearances but become firm to the extent that this
kind of appearance has preserved life-only to this extent is there
anything like “knowledge”; i.e., a measuring of earlier and later
errors by one another.

(Nietzsche)

Your thoughts about individuality are really not your own thoughts; they are all
collective thoughts. You think that you are the one who has the thoughts; in fact thoughts arise in consciousness.

(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

they do not ask the question; they stage it or overflow this stage in the direction of that element of the scene which exceeds representation.

(Derrida)

If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance,
and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice. of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. 3 It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it

(Derrida)

To be just: beyond the living present in general-and beyond its simple negative reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: “now,” future present). We are questioning in this instant, we
are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time,
at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition
of the specter does not belong to that time, it does not give time,
not that one: “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost”
(Hamlet).

(Derrida)

the future has the form of a past which I will never have witnessed and which for this reason remains always promised – and moreover also multiple.

(Derrida)

2019 (#118) : Malaguzzi , I Ching , Bettelheim , Gandini , Lacan , Nietzsche , Heidegger , 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)

Water flowing out from a mountain becomes a spring, pure and transparent, symbolizing the pureness of a child’s innocent mind. After the spring flows out of the mountain, it accumulates sediment over time … after Beginning, Childhood follows.

(I Ching)

On his second trip Jack gains the hen that lays the golden eggs: he has learned that one runs out of things if one cannot produce them or have them produced. With the hen Jack could be content, since now all physical needs are permanently satisfied. So it is not necessity which motivates Jack’s last trip, but the desire for daring and adven- ture-the wish to find something better than mere material goods. Thus, Jack next attains the golden harp, which symbolizes beauty, art, the higher things in life.

(Bettelheim)

The teachers decided early one morning to create a surprise for the twelve-month-old children by lining the whole infant room with packing paper and placing some large crayons here and there on the covered floor. They were not sure what would happen, but certainly they expected great reactions and decided that they would not interfere or prompt the children about the total change in their environment. They kept the door closed until the whole group of little children arrived. Then they opened the door, though quietly, to be ready to photograph the children’s surprise. The children came in, some crawling on all fours, some walking with tentative steps, two of them holding the hands of the teacher. They moved into the room as if absolutely nothing had changed. Some touched or pushed the crayons a bit as they moved on the paper next to them, but without paying it much attention. The teachers were ready with their cameras, ready to document the children’s surprise. The teachers waited and waited. Nothing happened. They were ready to put away the cameras, but at a certain point, Francesco started to play with the end of one of the large pieces of paper, and suddenly he tore it off with energy. The paper, which had originally been tightly rolled up, recoiled back into a long tube. Francesco looked at it and picked up the tube, exploring it with attention and pleasure. Then he looked around and grabbed a crayon that was just close enough and inserted the crayon with care into the tube. He seemed to be surprised that it had disappeared, and he looked toward the end of the tube. No, it was not there. He tried to unroll the paper tube looking for his crayon, but in so doing, the incline of the tube increased and the crayon rolled out.

Francesco was happy and repeated his explorations several times with different crayons. The teachers were surprised and delighted by the discoveries of the new game Francesco had invented. In reflecting about the experience, they first noted the skills and thoughtfulness that such a young child like Francesco could have. They also reminded themselves how everything is so new for children so young that the novelty of having a paper covering their entire floor was not something to make them particularly curious or surprised.

(Gandini)

The conception of the mirror stage I introduced at our last congress thirteen years ago, having since been more or less adopted by the French group, seems worth bringing to your attention once again—especially today, given the light it sheds on the / function in the experience psychoanalysis provides us of it. It should be noted that this experience sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.

Some of you may recall the behavioral characteristic I begin with that is explained by a fact of comparative psychology: the human child, at an age when he is for a short while, but for a while nevertheless, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can already recognize his own image as such in a mirror. This recognition is indicated by the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnis, which Kohler considers to express situational apperception, an essential moment in the act of intelligence.

(Lacan)

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)

The Freudian revolution, like any revolution, derives its meaning from its context, that is, from the form of psychology that dominated at the time it occurred. Now, any judgment about that form of psychology presupposes an exegesis of the documents in which it is propounded. I will establish the frame of this article by asking the reader to credit me here, at least provisionally, with having done this basic work, so that I can provide what seems to me to be an essential moment of critique. For while I consider it legitimate to privilege the historical method in studying facts of consciousness, I do not use it as a pretext to elude the intrinsic critique that questions their value. Such a critique, grounded in the secondary order conferred upon these facts in history by the element of reflection they involve, remains immanent in the data recognized by the method—in our case, in the expressed forms of the doctrine and the technique—assuming the method simply requires each of the forms in question to be what it purports to be. This will allow us to see why the late nineteenth century form of psychology that claimed to be scientific and forced itself even on its adversaries, thanks both to its apparatus of objectivity and its profession of materialism, simply failed to be positive, excluding from the outset both objectivity and materialism.

(Lacan)

To acknowledge and respect consists in
letting every thinker’s thought come to us as something in
each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible–and
being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his
thought. Wbat is unthought in a thinker’s thought is not a
lack inherent in his thought. What is un-thought is there in
each case only as the un-thought. The more original the
thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The
unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.

(Heidegger)

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 (#117) : Malaguzzi , Deleuze , Gandini , Derrida . Nietzsche

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.

Children have the right to imagine. We need to give them full rights of citizenship in life and in society.

(Malaguzzi)

The player-artist-child, Zeus-child:
Dionysus, who the myth presents to us surrounded his divine toys.
The player temporarily abandons himself to life and temporarily fixes
his gaze upon it; the artist places himself provisionally in his work and
provisionally above it; the child plays, withdraws from the game and
returns to it. In this game of becoming, the being of becoming also
plays the game with itself; the aeon (time), says Heraclitus, is a child
who plays, plays at draughts (Diels 53). The being of becoming, the
eternal return, is the second moment of the game, but also the third
term, identical to the two moments and valid for the whole.

(Deleuze)

Malaguzzi said very clearly that nothing in the school should happen without joy. I do not think that he would have separated play and learning. Malaguzzi’s very first explorations and experiences with children were based on play with a purpose. His views were contrary to ritual play managed and controlled by adults, where children were expected to repeat gestures and words chosen by teachers. In Reggio, when children arrive at school in the morning, they play with their friends using materials or games or toys. There is first of all the joy of finding their friends—friends with whom they will spend a long day together.

(Gandini)

If I had invented a writing it would have been as an endless revolution. Each situation demands the creation
of a suitable mode of exposition, the invention of a law of the singular event, take into account the
recipient, imagined or desired; and at the same time it demands the belief that this writing will determine
the reader, who will learn to read (or to “live”) this writing, which he is not used to finding elsewhere. One
hopes that he will be reformed, otherwise determined; for example, these grafts (short of confusion) of the
poetic on the philosophical, or certain ways of using homonyms, the undecidable, ruses of language – into
which many people see confusion, while ignoring the properly logical need for it.

(Derrida)

. . 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)

“Death, the ‘proper result’ and therefore the end of life, the end without end, the strategy without finality of the living — all of this is not solely a statement of Schopenheur’s. It also coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions that we had attempted to interpret: on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead (Joyful Wisdom), a ‘particular case’ and ‘means in view of something else’ (Will to Power), this something necessarily participating in death; and finally on the absence, in the last analysis, of anything like an instinct of conservation. The unconscious port of registry, at the distance of this generality, also will have been Nietzschean.”

(Derrida)

The new world-conception.– The world exists; it is not something that
becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it
passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from
passing away–it maintains itself in both.– It lives on itself: its
excrements are its food.

(Nietzsche)

2019 (#116) : Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Gandini , Derrida

It’s important for the teacher who works with young children to understand that she knows little about children. Teachers need to learn to see the children, to listen to them, to know when they are feeling some distance from us as adults and from children, when they are distracted, when they are surrounded by a shadow of happiness and pleasure, and when they are surrounded by a shadow of sadness and suffering. We have to understand that they are moving and working with many ideas, but their most important task is to build relationships with friends. They are trying to understand what friendship is. Children grow in many directions together, but a child is always in search of relationships. Children get to know each other through all their senses. Touching the hair of another child is very important. Smell is important. This is a way children are able to understand the identity of themselves and the identity of others.

(Malaguzzi)

We can fully believe it when at the end of Tootle we are told that Tootle has forgotten it ever did like flowers. Nobody with the widest stretch of imagination can believe that Little Red Riding Hood could ever forget her encounter with the wolf, or will stop liking flowers or the beauty of the world. Tootle’s story, not creating any inner convic- tion in the hearer’s mind, needs to rub in its lesson and predict the outcome: the engine will stay on the tracks and become a streamliner. No initiative, no freedom there. The fairy tale carries within itself the conviction of its message; therefore it has no need to peg the hero to a specific way of life. There is no need to tell what Little Red Riding Hood will do, or what her future will be. Due to her experience, she will be well able to decide this herself. The wisdom about life, and about the dangers which her desires may bring about, is gained by every listener.

(Bettelheim)

Teachers in Reggio Emilia work together and are supported by pedagogical coordinators; they all share and start from the basic principle that children have great potential and desire to explore, construct, and learn. The teachers consider the existing space in the city as learning space and prepare environments and situations in the school that respond to the gifts of children. Teachers observe the children in these possibility-rich environments, and on the basis of shared observations and documentations, they construct new possibilities for the children.

(Gandini)

I would be tempted to say that paralysis is the negative symptom of
aporia. Paralysis arrests, whereas aporia, at least as I interpret it (the possibility of the impossible, the “play” of a certain excess in relation to any
mechanical movement, oriented process, path traced in advance, or teleological
program), would be the very condition of the step [pas] , or even
of the experience of pathbreaking, route (via rupta), march [marche] , decision,
event: the coming of the other, in sum, of writing and desire.

(Derrida)

2019 (#115) : Malaguzzi , Bettelheim , Nietzsche , Derrida , D.T. Suzuki , Deleuze

We have to let children be with children. Children learn a lot from other children, and adults learn from children being with children. Children love to learn among themselves, and they learn things that it would never be possible to learn from interactions with an adult. The interaction between children is a very fertile and a very rich relationship. If it is left to ferment without adult interference and without that excessive assistance that we sometimes give, then it’s more advantageous to the child.

(Malaguzzi)

“Hansel and Gretel” is one of many fairy tales where two siblings cooperate in rescuing each other and succeed because of their combined efforts. These stories direct the child toward transcending his immature dependence on his parents and reaching the next higher stage of development: cherishing also the support of age mates. Cooperating with them in meeting life’s tasks will eventually have to re- place the child’s single-minded reliance on his parents only. The child of school age often cannot yet believe that he ever will be able to meet the world without his parents; that is why he wishes to hold on to them beyond the necessary point. He needs to learn to trust that someday he will master the dangers of the world, even in the exaggerated form in which his fears depict them, and be enriched by it.

(Bettelheim)

SELF-CONTROL–Self-appointed moralists who first and foremost advise the necessity of self-control thus gratify a strange malaise: I mean a constant quandry when dealing with impulses and natural inclinations–whatever could be called urges. Whether it is exterior or interior peril we refer to, whether we’re dealing with thoughts, attractions, or stimulations, such easily bothered souls always consider their self-control to be imminently in danger. Unable to trust instinct or spontaneity, they’re always on the defensive–eyes screwed up, sour, opposing even themselves–self-appointed “protectors of the fortress”: even though all the same, greatness isn’t beyond them! But how difficult it is for the others to put up with them! And how unbearable even to themselves they are–how impoverished, how isolated from the soul’s utter and lovely randomness, from all future experiences! For indeed, we must lose ourselves, for a time, so as to learn about existences that we AREN’T . . .

(Nietzsche)

and this openness opens the unity, renders it possible, and forbids it totality. Its openness allows receiving and giving.

(Derrida)

When the release takes place, whatever is born in the mind explodes like a volcanic eruption or spills out like lightning. Zen calls this ‘return to self’ . . .

( D.T. Suzuki)

In this world only the play of artists and children exhibits becoming and passing away, building and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as artists and children play, so plays the ever-living fire, building up and destroying, in innocence. Such is the game that the aeon plays with itself. It builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piling them up and trampling them down. From time to time it starts the game anew. A moment of satiety, and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by the need to create. Not hubris but the ever-newly-awakened impulse to play calls new worlds into being.

(Nietzsche)

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)