Adam’s childhood
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 13, 2026
One cannot comprehend our culture’s conception of the human being without remembering that at its foundation is a man without childhood: Adam. According to the Genesis narrative, the man that the Lord creates and puts in the Garden of Eden is an adult, to whom He speaks and gives commands, and for whom He creates a companion so that he will not be alone. And an adult only, certainly not an infante, could give a name to all animals in the garden.
It is not surprising that a being without childhood cannot remain innocent and is fatally doomed to guilt and sin. Perhaps the pessimism that condemns the Christian West to always postpone happiness and fulfillment to the future stems from this singular deficiency, which makes Adam a being constitutively devoid of childhood. And it is perhaps because of this lack, more original of any sin, that, on the one hand, childhood is for each of us the place of nostalgia for impossible happiness and, on the other, a defective condition in social organisation, which must be disciplined and educated at all costs. And if psychoanalysis sees the child as the hidden subject of every neurosis, this is perhaps just because the Adamic paradigm of a man without childhood acts somewhere within us.
This means that the recovery from the West’s disease — that is, an adult culture that, by repressing childhood, ends up condemning itself to puerility — shall be possible only if we will able to give Adam back his childhood.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, April 13, 2026
One cannot comprehend our culture’s conception of the human being without remembering that at its foundation is a man without childhood: Adam. According to the Genesis narrative, the man that the Lord creates and puts in the Garden of Eden is an adult, to whom He speaks and gives commands, and for whom He creates a companion so that he will not be alone. And an adult only, certainly not an infante, could give a name to all animals in the garden.
It is not surprising that a being without childhood cannot remain innocent and is fatally doomed to guilt and sin. Perhaps the pessimism that condemns the Christian West to always postpone happiness and fulfillment to the future stems from this singular deficiency, which makes Adam a being constitutively devoid of childhood. And it is perhaps because of this lack, more original of any sin, that, on the one hand, childhood is for each of us the place of nostalgia for impossible happiness and, on the other, a defective condition in social organisation, which must be disciplined and educated at all costs. And if psychoanalysis sees the child as the hidden subject of every neurosis, this is perhaps just because the Adamic paradigm of a man without childhood acts somewhere within us.
This means that the recovery from the West’s disease — that is, an adult culture that, by repressing childhood, ends up condemning itself to puerility — shall be possible only if we will able to give Adam back his childhood.
(English translation by I, Robot)
萧云从 (Xiāo Yúncóng), 女娲 (Nǚwā) repairing the pillar of heaven, 1645. Courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons. |
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