The Wild Child
The Wild Child
Politics and Ethics of the Name
This chapter focuses on the feral or wild child, as Jacques Derrida’s ethical injunction to a certain silence in the context of hospitality in relation to an extreme figure outside the law. It discusses the wild child in a political example of what Giorgio Agamben terms “inoperativity”, encountering crucial questions regarding the operational elements that articulate law and language. Unlike gypsies who are marked as rogues due to secret languages, the wild child is silent and does not speak, occupying a zone of indistinction between human and animal where language is revealed in its capacity to be semantic and asemantic.
Keywords: wild child, Jacques Derrida, silence, Giorgio Agamben, inoperativity, semantic, asemantic
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