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Title
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Children and Ghosts
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Description
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In fact, as we have seen, children correspond less to the dead than to ghosts. Within the perspective of signifying function, adults and dead belong to the same order, that of stable signifiers and the continuity between diachrony and synchrony. … But children and ghosts, as unstable signifiers, represent the discontinuity and difference between the two worlds. The dead person is not the ancestor: this is the meaning of the ghost. The ancestor is not the living man: this is the meaning of the child. For if the dead immediately became ancestors and ancestors immediately became living men, then the whole present would in an instant be transformed into past, and the whole past into present, and this would diminish that differential margin between synchrony and diachrony on which is based the potential for signifying relations, and with it the potential for human society and history. … so the passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead allows the persistence of two points of discontinuity which are necessary to maintain the operation of a signifying function. So the passage between synchrony and diachrony, between world of the living and world of the dead, occurs in a kind of 'quantum leap', in which the unstable signifiers are the cipher.
Within this perspective, ghosts and children, belonging neither to the signifiers of diachrony nor to those of synchrony, appear as the signifiers of the same signifying opposition between the two worlds which constitutes the potential for a social system. They are, therefore, the signifiers of the signifying function, without which there would be neither human time nor history.
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Creator
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Agamben, Giorgio
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Date
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1978
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Source
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In Playland: Reflections on History and Play ; Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience
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Bibliographic Citation
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Agamben, Giorgio. 1993 "In Playland: Reflections on History and Play." In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. Verson. Page 84 ;;
Agamben, Giorgio. 1978 lnfanzia e storia. Giulio Einandi Editore
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