From the "Generalized Child" to the "Singularized Infantile"

our ethical measure

Abstract

This work explores the term "generalized child" used by Lacan in his text Address on Childhood Psychoses, connecting it with some contemporary impasses in psychoanalysis. Starting from the notion of discourse as the apparatus of jouissance through language, the text examines how capitalist discourse, associated with technoscientific advances, on one hand dismembers the body to turn it into an object of exchange, and on the other promotes imaginary identifications that mask structural lack. The generalized child is an effect of this conjuncture that leaves subjects in an objectified position in relation to what they interpret from the Other's desire, whether through demands for recognition or adherence to ready-made signifiers offered by the market. In contrast, the text proposes the "singularized infantile" as a possibility for an ethical way out - not as a return to childhood, but as a delimitation of what escapes symbolic determinations and touches the real of the subject in its most singular dimension, allowing for the emergence of a way of life not colonized by capitalism's imperatives of jouissance.