Dr Kiff Bamford

The book Readings in Infancy has been published by Bloomsbury Academic after a long time in development. It is a translation of a book by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) which was originally published in France in 1991 as Lectures d’enfance. This is the first time the collection has been published in English and is comprised of essays on six writers and thinkers: James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valéry and Sigmund Freud. I’ve been working on this with Professor Robert Harvey from Stony Brook University, New York and, like most things, the pandemic caused delays but also gave us time to consider the original text in detail.

One of the key decisions has been to emphasise the idea of ‘Infancy’ rather than ‘childhood’, the translation sometimes used for ‘enfance’. For Lyotard ‘Infancy’ doesn’t refer to a stage of development or period of existence, which might be the understanding of ‘childhood’. Rather, for Lyotard, ‘Infancy’ refers to that state of not knowing which stays with us regardless of age. Not knowing, or not being able to articulate that which we might feel but not have the words or ability to express. It is a thread which is followed throughout the volume, as he writes "It haunts discourse and eludes it."

It was a rewarding experience to work with the Lyotard translator and literary scholar Robert Harvey. Together we brought together existing English translations of the essays which comprise Lectures d’enfance, these were revised, harmonized, annotated and an extensive bibliography of works by Lyotard in English translation was added. Separately we wrote an introduction (Harvey) and afterword (Bamford) to contextualise and draw out the most important themes. For me, there are echoes with other works by Lyotard that I’ve been interested in for some time because of the connection to creative practice, where art, writing or performance is pushed elsewhere, to that which isn’t the ‘already said’.

The project dovetailed well with the collection of essays by artists and writers I was also working on at the time, essays which responded to Lyotard’s ideas under the title Lyotard and Critical Practice (edited with Margret Grebowicz, 2022). It wasn’t the intention that the two projects overlap but on reflection their coincidence was exciting, tumultuous at times, but positive.

In my afterword to Reading in Infancy I write about the constellation of thinkers into which Lyotard might be placed. I want to unsettle presumptions about this thinker by bringing him alongside others. In focusing on Infancy I was brought to Giorgio Agamben and the extent to which both thinkers draw on Aristotle and ask questions of the presumed relationship of the human to animal, the human as animal and the privileged role given to a very particular type of articulated speech. Looking back now I can see a resonance with this and the chapter written jointly by Margret Grebowicz and the artist Marina Zurkow for Lyotard and Critical Practice. In this they discuss the interspecies relationship of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, the crustaceans which inhabit the distinctive callosities on their heads, and the humans who track the whales – now for protection but previously as prey – thanks to these markings.

More Lyotard! I am working on a new collection of Interviews and Debates with Lyotard, this will be the second volume and focus on the later work with new translations and recent re-discoveries. There is already too much potential material so the editing process will be hard, plus I’m hoping to go back to the archives in Paris, which always makes for surprises and more difficult decisions.