Lyotard’s Infancy: A Debt that Persists

“The capacity to feel pleasure and pain, affectivity, aisthèsis, is independent of its possible articulation…. This time before the logos is called infantia”

(Lyotard, “The Affect-Phrase” 109).

“[A]n ‘infancy,’ thus, which would not be a period of the life cycle, but an incapacity to represent and bind a certain something”

(Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews” 17).

Introduction

 
An infant child cannot speak; it murmurs and gurgles, grunts and groans, cries and screams, as the facility to speak in articulated language, though potential (held in abeyance, Lyotard repeatedly tells us), is not yet realized. Through a constant array of urgent needs, the infant reminds the adult world of all it lacks. Unwittingly negating the qualities of adulthood, the infant simultaneously seems to seek their restoration; the child is distressed, therefore comfort is sought from a parent; the child is hungry, so food is given; the child is frightened and cries, therefore assurance is given to prove that love and harmony are plentiful. We all pass through this time of infancy, yet little or no memory of it exists; we live this time before language through the stories told to us about our birth and of the type of baby we once were, and through photos and various other media that form a pastiche of a life that is ours, but not ours, in that we cannot remember it in any conscious sense. Memory is unprepared and ill-equipped to cope with this mysterious time in life, and any attempt at recollecting this radical “before” is bound to fail. In saying this, we acknowledge and accept that this infancy has been with us, even though it is recounted through others. In a special kind of way, this infancy makes its presence felt as a thread amongst threads in the polyphonous fabric of lived life that is “colored” by the present; this infancy, though not directly accessible, is singularly one’s own.
 
Lyotard’s notion of infancy incorporates these traits as part of an exegesis outlining the necessity of “an openness to non-being” that continues as “a debt that persists” and that we are obligated to honor in and through artistic action (“The Survivor” 163). This paper traces the contours of Lyotard’s approach to infancy as a pre-linguistic site whose sense of temporality differs from notions of lived and conscious time. The purpose of the paper is to explore both the dimensions of the debt that infancy demands of a body open to the touch of sensorial affect, and the requirement to pay in some way for this openness and affectivity. Lyotard evokes the nature of the infant body’s touch and its openness and receptivity to being touched in order to show how the aesthetic affect is both unavoidable and inescapable. The infancy born from this inevitable openness to affect comes at a price, however, as is graphically depicted in Lyotard’s essay on Kafka. The cruel incision of “the law” explored in the second section of this paper is described by Lyotard as the culturally “normed” and disciplined body that must “pay” for its infancy as the state of aesthetic openness. The infancy that Lyotard explores as a zone of indeterminacy inherent to the body that is open to affect eludes and escapes the determinations and certainties of the adult laws from which it emerges. This potential for aesthetic affectivity is described as infancy because of the affective state of inarticulacy and muteness that occurs before meaning and signification. The affective state of infancy means that art exists, and no system or apparatus of the law can harness that creativity as energy precisely because this mute infancy lies outside the “adult” world of articulation.
 
To many North American readers, the association of Lyotard with the notion of infancy will not be immediately recognizable. While the United States was famously receptive to the French “migration” of thought embodied in Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard himself, particularly from the mid-1980s onwards, Lyotard’s corpus is still being translated into English. A notable example of this is the work Discours, figure (1971), originally Lyotard’s thesis submitted as part of his doctorat d’état in 1954, later translated by Antony Hudek and the late Mary Lydon, and released to English-speaking audiences in 2011 as Discourse, Figure. Another example pertinent to this paper is the set of essays entitled Lectures d’enfance, which, although translated and published in English, remain scattered in various journals and compilations that have emerged gradually over a thirty-year period and that continue to do so. The haphazard and nonlinear publication of many of the essays and works into English has meant the Anglo-American reception of various ideas such as infancy remains relatively unexplored. Lyotard was not one for teleological development, linearity, or explicit modes of communication. The context-specific nature of those essays that, as a whole, methodologically perform and explore “infancy” in a specifically Lyotardian vein has furthermore meant that links between infancy and other essays by Lyotard (such as “Prescription,” the one engaged in this paper) remain opaque to English-speaking audiences.
 
Familiar to North American audiences, on the other hand, is the notion of the “postmodern” and Lyotard’s pivotal articulation of its “condition” in his eponymous The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. While Lyotard later eschewed much of this essay’s content and moved to a more Freudian psycho-literary framework, it left an indelible and profound mark both on the mass recall of what Lyotard stood for and on the body of intellectual and cultural work from the mid-1980s onwards. I don’t engage with The Postmodern Condition at great length here, but I do note its striking theme of “performativity” as the computerized version of cultural and intellectual “performance,” in which nuance, subtlety, and sensorial affect risk being annihilated or “deleted” from the apparatus of the cultural memory. Although linking the later notion of infancy to performativity simplifies Lyotardian thematic coherence to the extreme, it also indicates his persistent concern with “bearing witness” to those elements of lived sensorial life that cannot necessarily be turned into “data.” The notion of infancy explored by Lyotard was furthermore heavily influenced by Freud, as I explain below, but also bears the ethical stamp of “the other” and of human responsibility to otherness per se as developed from the work of Levinas and Arendt, with perhaps the most notable development and recent engagement emerging from Giorgio Agamben’s work. The latter, particularly, develops a Lyotardian iteration of infancy as a “state of exception” in the juridical processes of Western culture and politics—a “zone” that is unknowable in the eyes of the law and, as a consequence, lies outside the realm of justice. Agamben develops this aspect of infancy in greater detail not only in his Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, but also in the poetic Idea of Prose, which frames infancy and—pertinent to this paper—Kafka’s In the Penal Colony within an argument that engages with a Lyotardian-inspired analysis of the political/affective/juridical apparatus of Western culture.
 
Another dimension of Lyotard’s oeuvre that remains underdeveloped in English-speaking contexts that anticipate the last decade of his writings in the 1990s, to which the infancy writings belong, is his engagement with avant-garde art and artists. While relatively famous for his activity as a radical left-wing activist in the Marxist organization Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) during the late 1940s and 1950s, and then later as a fierce critic of Marxism in general, Lyotard’s work with painters in Central Europe and the United States is less well known in academia.¹ The “artistic” thread arguably runs through all of Lyotard’s thinking and writing on politics. This aesthetic theme is evident in his earlier formulation of the “differend” as the methodological device used to depict the inherent injustice of finding appropriate “phrases” (or idioms) in which to “phrase” political affect (The Differend: Phrases in Dispute). Lyotard sharpens his powers of aesthetic analysis, however, through the perspective of the figural dimension of the art space and the unknowability of aesthetic affect. Traversing a few nodal points on the surface of the Lyotardian oeuvre—the “figure” during the 70s, the “immaterial” and immateriality of artistic “matter” of the 1980s, the “inhuman” of the late 1980s, and the “inaudible” of the final set of writings dealing with Malraux and Augustine—indicates a distinctly artistic flavor of engagement with the temporal and spatial dimensions of thought, politics, and, indeed, art itself.
 
Lyotard’s infancy, however, is uniquely his. To arrive at this infant state, Lyotard works over the Freudian infantia and re-inscribes it as the persistent and relentless fissure within “bodily” space: an incalculable “blank” or “monstrous” presence that demands the body be both penetrable to the infant touch and indebted to this infancy precisely because of this penetrability. Lyotard dissipates the body, expanding it beyond anthropomorphic parameters and the logos into formations of immaterial matter that exist as a way of being in and toward space and time. He calls this positionality the “anima minima” or “minimal soul” that exists through the touch of the aesthetic event. Lyotard explores infancy as a zone in which the “work” in art is conveyed through an inaudible gesture that touches and alters temporality. He stretches the borders of the body to include infancy as a zone of pure affect at work inside the art object. This zone mobilizes the capacity to be touched from the outside by that artwork as a sensorial affect. In what follows, I trace the contours of Lyotard’s writing on aesthetics by investigating these touches within the full spectrum of the body as both an artistic and “fleshly” apparatus in possession of, but also held to ransom by, a specifically Lyotardian formulation of infancy as the space of bodily receptivity to the aesthetic event.
 
The paper is split into three sections that elaborate a notion of infancy in slightly different guises and according to different approaches. The first section gives an overall impression of Lyotard’s use of the term “infancy,” covering the use of the term “childhood” that becomes interchangeable with it in the later decade of writings that return to the influence of Freud. This section details why Lyotard would take such an active interest in the notion of infancy and childhood as a special space of Orwellian-inspired bodily resistance. The next section takes a different approach, and instead engages with one important text to provide a different perspective that explores the more complex nuances of this notion of infancy. I explore a literary appropriation of a short story by Kafka that depicts the violence to which the body is subjected when initiated into dominant social constructions described under the rubric of the “law.” In the essay “Prescription,” infancy is situated as the zone of indeterminacy that escapes constructs of determination and mastery and remains elusive to modern tendencies to prescribe and control differing modes of the law. The final section draws on the previous iterations of infancy and explores the way infancy incorporates a dimension of both pleasure and pain. “Blood” is the symbolic trace that testifies to the pleasure and pain and to the joy and suffering of the aesthetic affect. Debt and reparation make up the conceptual thread connecting these three depictions of infancy to each other, and thus the first section considers debt as an obligation to honor the infant state, the second section considers the violent price a body must pay for harboring its own infancy, and the final section considers the payment of affect as the cost the infant body must bear.
 

Beginning Anew: Honoring the Infant

 
Why and how is this artistic-oriented honoring of the infant necessary? Here we embark on a particularly elusive and vexing dimension of Lyotard’s “writing.” In an essay dedicated to his own son in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, the collection of essays addressed to children, Lyotard exhorts the infant David—and the readers he knows will come later—to “extend the line of the body in the line of writing” (96).² By providing a connecting conceptual thread between the body and writing, Lyotard encourages an expansion of the zone of affectivity as a space that harbors its own resistance to dominant modes of discourse. This connection of the body to creative force expands the fleshly borders of the body into an affective site in which an unpredictable event might happen. Extending the lines of the body in lines of writing extends the possibilities of an infant encounter, as well as providing greater flexibility and the possibility of thinking and creating outside the already known. Lyotard’s notion of “writing” both embodies infancy and connects the body to a site of infancy understood as an aesthetic event and affective state that exceeds the borders of the sensing body.
 
The essay entitled “Gloss on Resistance” draws on George Orwell’s 1984 and the resistance posed by the lead character Winston’s diary entries as the only moment in which freedom could ever be exercised within the oppressive and totalitarian system he inhabits. The infancy “within” Winston as indeterminacy and lost memory extends to the infancy of language in the creative labor of Winston’s diary entries. Lyotard sees Winston’s desire to express himself in ways that escape the confines of the prescribing and controlling system as the most potent form of resistance; Winston’s childhood is his alone. No matter how ubiquitous and controlling the present society, this childhood can never be erased. For Lyotard, Winston’s writing is a labor “allied to the work of love, but it inscribes the trace of the initiatory event in language and thus offers to share it, if not as a sharing of knowledge, at least as a sharing of a sensibility that it can and should take as communal” (96–97). This sharing of a sensibility is far more important to Lyotard, in that everyone has their own singular expression and occurrence of infancy and childhood. The “facts” of these childhoods are not important; what is important is simply that everyone has a childhood, at the very least in terms of an unknown past or area of indeterminacy. For Lyotard, Winston has his “real life” equivalents in the form of Adorno and Benjamin. The childhood that Lyotard ascribes to the writings of these two writers cannot be captured, and remains elusive while still providing the impetus for new beginnings. A story-like manner befitting the subject matter initiates the reader into this open sense of childhood:
 

Let us recall—in opposition to this murder of the instant and singularity— those short pieces in Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street and A Berlin Childhood, pieces Theodor Adorno would call “micrologies.” They do not describe events from childhood; rather they capture the childhood of the event and inscribe what is uncapturable about it. And what makes an encounter with a word, odor, place, book, or face into an event is not its newness when compared to other “events.” It is its very value as initiation. You only learn this later. It cut open a wound in the sensibility. You know this because it has since reopened and will reopen again, marking out the rhythm of a secret and perhaps unnoticed temporality. This wound ushered you into an unknown world, but without ever making it known to you. Such initiation initiates nothing, it just begins.

(90–91)

 
To complement and expand this notion of childhood, as an aging man Lyotard increasingly develops a notion of infancy informed by Freud’s “sexuated (sexuée)” body (“Freud, Energy and Chance” 11).³ For Freud, the “sexual” mobilizes the body’s receptivity to excitation and affection, and Lyotard incorporates this “excitable” dimension of the body in his own continuing investigation into the negative presence of a “formless mass” that arrests, moves, and excites in a work of art (“Anima Minima” 17). Lyotard weaves these Freudian-sexual and affective-artistic conceptual threads into a complex yet malleable web encompassing art, presence, and time. The formulation of infancy that incorporates artistic and sensorial dimensions preoccupies and colors the final decade of his writings, of which the major works Heidegger and “the jews,” Postmodern Fables, The Inhuman, Lectures d’enfance, Misère de la philosophie, Signed Malraux, Soundproof Room, and The Confession of Augustine are emblematic. These last works, along with the various journal articles and essays from this period, employ the constant pedagogical task of rewriting and re-working the enigma of “presence” in art. They try to elaborate this artistic presence as a gesture emerging from within the artistic space. Proceeding from his philosophical engagement with the inarticulate unconscious via Freud, Lyotard incorporates a re-articulation of the Kantian sublime “spasm” as constitutive of the aesthetic experience. From this angle, art as testimony “remembers” its infancy, recalling the sublime as “the ungraspable and undeniable ‘presence’ of a something which is other than mind and which, ‘from time to time,’ occurs….” (“Time Today” 75). These qualities render infancy with a temporality that separates it, when given artistic co-ordinates, from chronological measurements of time. For Lyotard, this bears significantly on later thoughts of resistance within late-capitalist formulations of captured and pre-programmed notions of time.⁴
 
As pointed out by Geoffrey Bennington, this transition to a notion of infancy can be tracked alongside a career-long preoccupation and attachment to “[s]ignifying the other of signification” (“Figure, Discourse” 57).his emerges at the very least, and even if not fully acknowledged as such, as the theme or motif of an “evasive configuration” (5). Through the “libidinal band” in Libidinal Economy, the “figure” of Discourse, Figure, the “unpresentable” in the works of the postmodern, and the ethically incommensurable and heterogeneous language idioms and games in The Differend, Lyotard “finally” arrives at infancy, which Bennington describes as “less a self-present state, still less a period of life that is to be brought to presence, as it were, and more a mute (or all but mute) accompaniment or lining of all my more adult-seeming utterances, accessible always only indirectly or laterally, inventively, ‘artistically’, in ‘writing’” (“Figure, Discourse” 58). Infancy is seen here not as chronologically prior to adulthood, but more as a baffling and un-graspable zone that, Lyotard muses provocatively, squats over, within, and alongside the expanded body of the artwork or “adult” as signified or presented discourse or apparatus. Direct access to infancy, a clandestine visitor of the adult body, is never granted but instead must be creatively coaxed out of hiding. Infancy does not answer to direct demands.
 
Traversing these later writings are the artistic “names” of this silent infancy, all of which are endowed with a certain negativity. Arakawa’s “blank,” Paul Klee’s “uncolor” grey, and Pascal Quignard’s mute death rattle are mentioned alongside other literary and theoretically inspired “names” such as Jacques Lacan’s “Thing” or la chose and Samuel Beckett’s “unnameable.”⁵ These infant modalities are delicately filigreed throughout Lyotard’s writing and into his renewed engagement with psychoanalysis. Bennington further points out that the focus of these late writings shifts more to the silence of the differend itself and to its “affective dimension” (8), something Lyotard spoke of as being the “supplement” to his eponymous book.⁶ The gap between signification and presentation is never resolved and must not be, for it is the condition of silence that marks itself as a differend. The notion of infancy articulated in the later writings bears on the silent affect provoked by the differend and aligns with the destitution and “misère” of the infant encounter as incomplete, inarticulate, ungraspable, and unprepared.
 
In the set of essays The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Lyotard’s focus intensifies around the figure of the infant as articulated through a notion of a childhood that is depicted alongside an indebtedness never to be paid off. (“This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off” (The Inhuman 7).) Recalling Fynsk’s proposition of speaking of the passage from an infancy of the body to an aesthetic mode of encounter, these writings emphasize a critical approach to a humanism that hermetically seals off childhood as a past period of the life cycle. Lyotard warns, however, that that the creative impetus (or drive [“Trieb”]) emerges precisely through the traits of indeterminacy and unpreparedness, and these qualities make their appearance in their “childish” guises of distress, anxiety, and fear. In line with the questioning of the human in this set of essays, Lyotard maintains that distressed childhood as a figure of infancy “appears” and haunts the human long past the end of its supposed anthropological determination and, by doing so, heightens the very possibilities of existence. He explains further: “Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible” (3–4). The negative dimension of this formulation is clear: the child is human because of the qualities that make it less than human (or “inhuman”), and the delay in entering humanity is what makes the infant figure so potent. Lyotard continues, “Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human” (4).
 
The passage between a childhood that outlines a non-representational oblivion of infancy as constitutive of a negative-ontological mode of being arrives at a creative encounter of infancy as a “remainder” that cannot be assimilated by discursive and representational forms of signification. In Lyotard’s lexicon at this point, infancy names a radical encounter engendering an enigmatic silence that both appends itself to and distends discourse. In its radical excess, Lyotard’s formulation of infancy pushes past the limits of a specifically psychoanalytic theory. To listen for the enigmatic silence of the infant figure is, for Lyotard, to acknowledge the wound that infancy inflicts on the maturation of thought, discourse, and aesthetic matter; we write against words, we compose music against silence, we paint against the visible. Infancy haunts, but it does not speak. The text discussed in the following section is testimony to this haunting.
 

“Prescription”⁷

We speak of a “blood debt.” But there is blood and blood. Sanguis: the blood of life in the arteries and veins; and cruor: the blood that is spilled. The first nourishes the flesh. It gives it its hue of blueness, its pinkness, its pallor, its sallowness, its early-morning freshness, the infinite juxtaposition of nuances that drive the painter and the philosopher crazy; an immaterial matter. As for the law, this innocence of the flesh is criminal. It must expiate this fleshly innocence. The blood that flows is called cruor. Expiation requires cruelty, crudelitas versus fidelitas.

(“Prescription” 180)

 
Written in the aftermath of a virulent backlash to his provocative polemic Heidegger and “the jews,” “Prescription” turns to literature to elaborate a sense of violence, guilt, and manipulation that mirrors the horror of the Holocaust and also elaborates a certain dimension of infancy as existing alongside a notion of inescapable and interminable “originary” guilt. Given first as a lecture in 1989 and published in Lectures d’enfance, the essay draws upon Kafka’s darkly ironic short story In the Penal Colony and supplements Heidegger and “the jews” (hereafter referred to as HTJ) by creatively drawing on Freud’s unconscious in covert and enigmatic ways. Both HTJ and “Prescription” deal with infancy in a way that elaborates on what can exceed and escape the clutches of what is known and heard. The earlier text deals with the inaudible affect that is “heard” in exemplary fashion in Talmudic law and that became the object of termination in the anti-Semitism of National Socialism. “Prescription” deals with a corporeal infancy that escapes the determination of a law that wants to claim and remove it as the part of the body that resists legal prescription.
 
That these two texts can be considered companion pieces is not immediately obvious, apart from their proximate publication dates. Avital Ronell first hinted at this in her review, and Lyotard himself mentioned the links in a late interview (“Before the Law, After the Law”). It is tempting to read “Prescription” as an alternative approach from a man frustrated by negative feedback, and Christopher Fynsk reports Lyotard’s genuine distress and anxiety at the negative view many of his colleagues and readers held toward his work on “the jews.” The essay also depicts the theme of originary guilt first articulated in HTJ in a more violent but perhaps more palatable version because of the fictional framework. Lyotard explains: “Heidegger and ‘the jews’ was a first attempt, written very quickly and impatiently (for which I have been much criticized); the text on Kafka was written more patiently, though apparently, if I may say, under the law of Kafka himself” (40).
 
“Prescription,” then, creatively embellishes and improvises on HTJ’s depiction of testifying to that which escapes the “apparatus.” The notion of the political as a historical scene and apparatus was used in HTJ along with the accompanying application to the site of the conscious and unconscious derived from Freudian metapsychology. Here the political/psychical usage of the apparatus provided the site for demonstrating how the annihilation of the Jews testified to what was supposed to disappear through their annihilation. Conversely, the acts of killing and of bringing onto the political apparatus the anti-Semitism in “Enlightened,” “modern” Europe actually testified to the indeterminate and uncontrollable dimensions that such an “Enlightened” modernity failed to harness or acknowledge. What escapes the apparatus cannot disappear or be forgotten, precisely because nothing is remembered. The mute indecipherability of “the jews” could not be exterminated because its “existence” lies outside the political apparatus capable of hearing. In Lyotard’s fictional demonstration of this, the body’s infancy lies forever outside the reach of the apparatus of death, no matter how effective the execution.
 
Lyotard turns to Kafka’s fictional torture device to help explain the inhabitancy of an infancy that renders the body guilty before any “touch” of the “law” as language, discourse, knowledge, or memory (even education) can “discipline” or know it. In describing Kafka’s brutally clear writing as “white with hallucination,” Lyotard opts for a metaphorical bloodletting of the story that drips from his pen and stains his own text with the “blood” of Kafka’s condemned man (“Prescription” 76). Evocative descriptions of incising and engraving flesh and of draining blood that the body “pays” for are presented as constitutive, precisely, of a flesh-and-blood body. This is the infancy, like the immaterial matter that colors and breathes life into the human body through warm blood and blue veins in the above quote, that must be “expiated,” drained, and annihilated by a law demanding that it know and control the body. The law, however, can never know this translucent beauty inherent to the infancy within it, and as such is “jealous” of this enigmatic radiance “before” the touch of the law.
 
As Lyotard declares, his essay “Prescription” is written “under the law” of Kafka, which indicates a shared sentiment whose stakes could be described as “not to create beauty, but rather to bear witness to a liability to that voice that, within man, exceeds man, nature, and their classical concordance” (“Return Upon the Return” 198). Rather than direct explication, Lyotard steers clear of an explanation of Kafka’s intentions in terms of the mechanics of the story, and instead creatively interprets the feeling and nuance of Kafka’s writing as a way of continuing and “honoring” Kafka’s artistry. The “law” that is obeyed in this approach means that the meanings of both Kafka’s story and of Lyotard’s appropriation of Kafka remain elusive. This might explain why Anne Tomiche describes Lyotard as being particularly cautious when dealing with literature, despite his frequent references to literary sources as a way of explaining philosophical concepts. Tomiche explains Lyotard’s care to “always underscore how the commentary is never adequate to the literary text” (150) in his use of these literary examples throughout his writing. In this context, Lyotard is more interested in the tone and “diffracted” traces within the infancy of language deployed by Kafka (in extreme form, according to Lyotard) than he is in a literary commentary or character analysis. Lyotard does, however, outline the sweep of the story, and it is worth a brief excursion here to do the same.
 
Set on a nameless, geographically isolated tropical island, Kafka’s short story In the Penal Colony follows a Western explorer who observes the execution of a criminal at the behest of the colony’s recently appointed Commandant. The execution is officiated by a loyal officer who was an ardent supporter of the former (Old) Commandant of the island. It is the Old Commandant who bequeathed the “fabulous” machine of death to the stewardship of the officer (and thereby inspired the continuing frenzied ardor of his officer-disciple). The machine, simply called the “Apparatus,” is a complex conglomeration of mechanisms set in a structure that sits in the open next to a deep pit in the earth. The officer takes great delight, while climbing a ladder to check the Apparatus, in explaining to the (slightly nonplussed) explorer its differing elements and the various functions of its different parts. Lyotard explains these parts and their uses in the following:
 

The officer describes to the Western explorer—in French—the machine for execution and how its parts work: the tilting Bed, the box of cogwheels called the Designer, and the Harrow, with its glass needles irrigated by water. The machine writes the sentence on the body of the condemned, recto and verso. Or rather, it cuts it into his body until he dies, bloodless. The coup de grace is delivered by a long steel needle (the only one in the apparatus) that pierces his forehead. After which, the bed tips the tortured body into a pit.

(176)

Further details are revealed. The “Bed” is molded to fit the human body with appended belts to keep the accused pinned down, and is smothered in a layer of absorbent cotton wool to help soak up the blood he will shed. The Bed, evocative of a pig on a spit, slowly rotates once the victim has been securely fastened, to allow fresh flesh to be exposed for inscription. The “Harrow,” consisting of glass needles, is contoured around the human form, and the incisions of its needles are controlled to gouge the skin evenly and uniformly as they go deeper. The “Designer,” consisting of the cogwheels, has been pre-programmed to control the length and administration of the written sentence that is followed, literally, to the exact letter of the law.

 
Not fully comprehending these details at first, the explorer becomes in equal measure more intrigued and horrified as his knowledge grows, until he finally asks what heinous crime the condemned man has committed to warrant such a brutal and tortured demise. The answer, of course, is that the condemned man does not know his crime, has not been convicted through a trial, nor has he even had the chance of defending himself; his guilt is original and certain. “Guilt,” says the officer to the explorer, “is never to be doubted” (Kafka 145). The officer’s farcical explanation is drawn directly from Kafka’s text, with Lyotard quoting it for full impact:
 

If I had first called the man before me and interrogated him, things would have got into a confused tangle. He would have told lies, and had I exposed these lies he would have backed them up with more lies, and so on and so forth. As it is, I’ve got him and I won’t let him go.

(Kafka qtd. in “Prescription” 181)

The Violent Touch of the Law

 
What can we make of this “originary” sin when considered next to Lyotard’s notion of infancy?⁸ In tracing a line from the guilt of the condemned man to a guilt that is both singular and universal, Lyotard honors his own methodological dictum of extending the lines of the body in writing. Kafka’s story can be read primarily as a critique of the aestheticization of the political, with violence inflicted as punishment on the “political” body through the touch of the law that is inscribed onto its adult surface. In Heidegger and “the jews,” the Apparatus was a construct of modernity that held an arrogant fidelity to certainty and mastery and was exemplified by the rise of the Nazi Party. In “Prescription,” the Apparatus is a more obvious construct of brutality that leaves a mark on the flesh of the body by trying to acquire, through draining the blood, the beauty that renders the body an infant through this blood. The body must pay for its infancy by relinquishing the ungraspable and elusive infant quality that it shelters. In the elegantly written passage that speaks of the blood debt, Lyotard takes us one step closer to illuminating the infancy that the Apparatus is so desperate to acquire, and that kills as soon as it takes hold.
 
Kafka would succumb to tuberculosis-induced starvation in 1924 before the horrors of the Holocaust, but as Czech Jews, his sisters would all be transported, first to the Lodz Ghetto, and eventually to deportation and death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. The blind faith of Kafka’s officer and the ruthless performativity of the Apparatus point a prescient and chilling barb at the dangerously inhumane dimension of the bureaucratic-inspired terror that would begin to grip Europe a mere ten years after Kafka’s death and that was steadily gaining ground during his lifetime. Although Lyotard sees the inscription of the law onto the body in a more figurative sense, there is something extremely disconcerting about the image of the fine needles cutting into the flesh of the condemned man for a crime that, beyond the title “convict” or “Jew,” remained incomprehensible and secret. The devoted officer in the penal colony points out there is no use in knowing the crime: “There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body” (Kafka qtd. in “Prescription” 180).
 
The death camps of the Second World War would be the literal application of the Harrow’s inscription on the skin of the “condemned,” and the crime would be just as baffling. Kafka’s “hallucinatory” powers would be prophetic when history became literally tattooed onto skin in the form of concentration camp serial numbers and “guilt” would be beyond scrutiny and recrimination. As Rosi Braidotti so eloquently states (here evoking the analogy of the tattoo), this inscription on the flesh that history inflicts is inherently violent and, at the very least, leaves a decisive impression: “One may be empowered or beautified by it” she goes on to say, “but most people are not; some just die of it” (3). Kafka’s fictional penal colony, always intended as a satirical comment, instead started to colonize the realm of real life in ways that would have directly affected his personal situation and indeed impacted tragically on that of his family. History’s inscription did indeed prove lethal.
 
No doubt tainted with this historical bloodlust as reparation for perceived “crimes,” Lyotard’s interpretation of the story takes a slightly different tack and intensifies the temporal disjuncture between the incision, the bleeding wound, and the debt of the crime. If we are to view the chronological order of Lyotard’s writing within a schematic structure (which is problematic for many reasons⁹ ), the analogy of the first touch of the law “before” the punishment of cut flesh would be emphasized within the rubric of technological efficiency and the “blind” performativity that Lyotard identified in the writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s, of which The Postmodern Condition is the most famous example. In Lyotard’s interpretation of the story, the Designer carries out the inscription of the crime, which remains secret to everyone but the Old Commandant. The instructions that are fed into it (let’s say programmed) ensure the entire Apparatus “knows” exactly how it will go about inscribing the condemned body before the execution takes place. The analogy of the computer is drawn directly: “This box [as a component of the Designer] is what we now term the ‘dead memory’ in a computer, the text of the program being its living memory. Once the program is inserted, one presses the Enter key” (“Prescription” 177). Lyotard takes the analogy of a computer further when considering the performance of the Apparatus as a whole: “The machine is blind not because it does not know how to read,” he explains, “but because it can read only the prescriptions inscribed in the language of the former Commandant” (177). This is crucial to the performance of the Apparatus; it follows instructions that have to have been entered and “prescribed” ahead of time. There is no ability to judge or to experiment; the Apparatus, like the computer, simply obeys the orders that have been prescribed without the necessity for reflection or thought.
 
Clearly Lyotard is interested in more than a straightforward analogy between the penal colony’s torture device and the blind performativity of technology, and here a further subtlety emerges in his interpretation of the story. The violence inflicted by the Harrow is, in a more nuanced reading, the reparation the body “pays” for having been touched a “first” time before the law of the Harrow. Lyotard reaches beyond the performative mode of the Apparatus as a blind technical device to a figurative analysis of the violence that any induction inscribes upon the body, particularly in such unavoidable and potentially calamitous examples as language and discourse. The infancy constituting an innocence of unfettered openness before the law (of language, of adulthood, of knowledge, of education) requires a payment as a wrong—this innocence, Lyotard paradoxically asserts, is guilty precisely because it is innocent and this in itself reveals complicities between the law and infancy. Nothing can stop the violation of this innocence in its induction processes, and to a certain extent this is inevitable: a necessary evil. The law, then, also needs this infancy in order to be enacted as the law.
 
The complicity and reciprocity that Lyotard identifies within the paradox of infancy is aptly illustrated by Claudia Benthien’s observation that Kafka, when writing of the quivering body as the flesh is inscribed, seems to anthropomorphize the Apparatus by describing it as leaning forward with anticipation toward the body. Benthien, through Kafka, isolates the almost ecstatic dimension exhibited by the Apparatus in the act of penetrating and puncturing skin. In the context of Lyotard’s analysis, this ecstasy is channeled into the enthusiasm to cut out, expose, or capture the immaterial matter and “infant” quality that lies under the skin. The fluid that escapes these wounds, though, is not the blood that provides the aesthetic beauty as the immaterial matter of the skin that Lyotard calls sanguis. Instead, this is the murderous black blood of cruor, the blood made visible when reaching for the life-blood of the veins that colors the skin and, innocently, gives it its “hue” and immaterial radiance. Infancy as innocence is the crucial point because of the implication to the body and its aesthetic potentiality. “Innocence,” continues Lyotard in regard to the law, “is in all certainty the sin because it knows nothing of good and evil…. The heading, what comes first, is not the commandment; it is birth or infancy, the aesthetic body” (182). In this reading, innocence as infancy is akin to Lyotard’s formulation of the affect-phrase. This innocence is embedded in the silent but always present potentiality of the infant body.
 

The Blood of Affect

But the wound we are talking about … bleeds incessantly, it demands, of course, to be treated, but also not to be treated, to be respected…

(“Before the Law, After the Law” 52)

 
Lyotard’s notion of infancy is developed further. The temporality of the “wound” of childhood as an event now needs to be reintroduced, and the “body” that has been strapped into the torture device and cut into by the Kafkaesque law needs to be repositioned. This final iteration of infancy is a culmination both of the Benjamin-inflected event of childhood as an opening into “secret temporalities” outlined in the first section of this paper, and of the elusive intangibility of infancy as constantly under threat in the second section. This third iteration of infancy requires a transformation of Kafka’s punctured body from a human/political apparatus to one far more amorphous and temporal—a “surface” on which the cut of the law shifts to a “touch” of aesthetic affect. This touch is no less violent in its own way, and Lyotard will call upon the violence shared by “cut” and “touch” as a necessary mechanism of displacement that occurs through aesthetic affect. The epigraph above, however, forces a reconsideration of the attempt at shutting down infancy that Kafka’s parable seems to signal, and the needles and the Harrow dissolve to leave, instead, a constant bleeding wound.
 
What is curious in the above quote is Lyotard’s urge to respect as well as to alleviate the seeping blood of the wound, to honor the cut in some distinct way so that “blood” can continue to flow. This iteration of infancy is perhaps Lyotard’s most mysterious, and yet innovative, theoretical musing. Different from the Marxian-inflected structure of the apparatus that we saw in the above section, the “body,” in Lyotard’s last attempt, must have the perishable fragility of flesh, blood, and beating pulse. Lyotard now positions the immediate violence of Kafka’s needles drawing blood within the immediacy of the bodily context of sensing the temporal aesthetic affect. Rather than taking or shutting down infancy, the bleeding wound referred to above is the inscription of being “touched” by art. The quality of being cut into, the positionality involved in the receptiveness of the touch, and the seeping blood all serve to complicate the notion of capturing the infancy “under” the skin. This slightly altered perspective turns the “uncapturability” of infancy into the trace of what is left behind. Instead of capturing infancy through puncturing skin, the wound is repositioned as the instantaneous inscription etched through the temporal coordinates of the event. Blood is the proof that “something” has occurred, the sign that the body has been exceeded and that sensibility has been affected beyond what it can sense.
 
The demands Lyotard makes on us here can be described in this way: We pay for what we are at the expense of ourselves. Put otherwise, art is the reminder that infancy, as the quality of human negation, is precisely what makes us human. We pay to live, to think, to create, and what we pay with is the instant threat of never doing any of those things again, of being, essentially, anaesthetized to the vibrancy of life. Kafka’s brutal tattooing of flesh, of violent bloodletting, serves for Lyotard as both the depiction of the inscription of the law, a predominantly brutal form of power, and as the celebration of the touch of the event as a clearing of potentiality and life. Blood is the symbol of both the debt and the answering of a demand, of both the threat and the joy of the event that “occurs” instantaneously and without warning or meaning. Lyotard describes this simultaneous affection that consists of both pleasure and pain as a double bind, held within the temporality of the aesthetic event. “Art, writing give grace to the soul condemned to the penalty of death, but in such a way as not to forget it” (“Anima Minima” 245). Infancy, as a state of pure and open reception, is the reminder of a vulnerability that is imbued with both privation and potentiality.
 

Ending and Beginning

 
This paper has explored the notion of infancy, arguably not a well-known dimension of Lyotard’s work, that informs the guiding methodology he uses as a theoretical and performative approach to writing. I have described Lyotard’s depiction of infancy as a state of unadorned openness and receptiveness. Lyotard’s writing on this topic heralds the final decade and works of his career, and complicates the work on the Kantian sublime as the instantaneous mixture of both the pleasure and pain of sensuous affect. I also contend that infancy, for Lyotard, serves as a pivotal methodological device in which the Aristotelian dimension of affect as a disturbance of the “soul” is reinscribed so as to reposition his earlier work on the “political.” This paper, finally, has presented the complexity of Lyotard’s exploration of the temporal and affective dimensions of the event, which he continues to address in his last three major works (Soundproof Room, Signed Malraux, and The Confession of Augustine).
 
For Lyotard, the body is always in excess of the law, always “there” beforehand, always an untamable cluster of potentialities that are open and receptive to the inscriptions and touches of affect. This potentiality comes at a price, however, and this paper has explored the privation of infancy as the negation of all modes of expression, meaning, and articulation. Infancy allows the body to exceed itself to reach beyond the borders of what it can sense, but this capacity for affectivity exists as the debt that must be paid at the expense of the body. Infancy can be approached only as a series of beginnings, which ensures that artistic creation will continue as long as people are subject to birth and death. This is the debt that is paid for in Kafka’s blood, but also in never fully exhausting the ability to create anew.