childhood times: language and experience

Abstract

We approach in the essay the temporality of childhood, taking as horizon the language and experience. Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben are the main thinkers who help us to address the fragile experience in contemporaneity, in the sense that the current ways of life are full of everyday practices that are not transformed into experience. To restore experience it is necessary to understand childhood as a condition of existence that accompanies all life; it is a subject who is exposed to historicity and who makes history, discontinuous history and singular event. With this in mind, through Manuel de Barros' poetic power we rekindle the relationship between childhood temporalities, language and experience, because ins this relation present itself the intensity of a lived that is devoid of a successive and chronological time. The creative power of this language has in the becoming-child the artisan for the creation of another perspective in the search for the inaugural source of words: to advance to the beginning and reach the childing of words. From these constructed approaches, we understand that together, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Manuel de Barros invite us to resume our childhood, in the search for the first meaning of words, which we only find with the presence of childhood. Here, it is not about establishing an absolute truth about childhoods and their times, but of finding ways to think about how to constitute other relationships with and in time.