Readings in Infancy

'Nobody knows how to write'. Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the 20th century Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as <i>Lectures d'enfance</i> these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development either human or technological.<br/><br/>Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism such as James Joyce Franz Kafka Hannah Arendt Jean-Paul Sartre and Sigmund Freud. This volume - with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford - contextualises Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.