The world cup

The world cup here in Brazil is quite something: it's basically a month long vacation with soccer four and a half hours a day, and when the Brazilian national team plays, everything shuts down.  Everything: including health centers and even most of the police.  So as one might imagine, Helena Iara has seen a lot of soccer in the last two weeks; or perhaps to put it better, she has been with me as I have been watching  lot of soccer.

A couple of nights ago as I tried to entertain Helena for a bit (she wasn't sleepy, but everyone else was!), I started off quoting Sartre on soccer, and then wove an argument that I found interesting, and which kept her looking in my eyes attentively.  "In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team," he declared, and anyone who sits through a 0-0 tie, suffering with a team that simply can't penetrate the other defense, will sympathize with the great existentialist.  On the other hand, talking with a baby, somehow that didn't quite makes sense, or perhaps it just reminded me of another and more thoughtful comment, this one by Emmanuel Kant:

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. (From the Critique of Pure Reason)

In fact, Kant is suggesting, the things that we imagine are barriers to what we want, are in fact exactly what we need to get that result: to use a phrase beloved by Zizek, "the conditions of impossibility are truly the conditions of possibility."  The bird needs the air that seems to hold him back, while the soccer team needsa strong opponent in order to play well, to challenge it to do something better: compare Brazil's performance against North Korea to its elegant soccer against Ivory Coast.

Now, what does this have to do with children?  How did I talk about this issue with Helena Iara?  Well, there is a similar kind of common sense about infancy, that life would be much easier if we came out of the womb like a horse, all ready to run.  Instead, we have to teach Helena almost everything: walking and talking and thinking and running (and in a couple of years, playing soccer...).  We even have to teach her to sleep!  Wouldn't it be easier if humans were just born with these capacities?  Especially this week, as we have tried to teach Helena to sleep on her own, I'm very sympathetic with the Sartrean perspective on soccer.

But what would humanity be if we were born with all of these skills?  According to Giorgio Agamben,

Imagine a man already equipped with language, a man who already possessed speech.  For such a man without infancy, language would not be a pre-existing thing to be appropriated, and for him there would neither be any break between language and speech nor any historicity of language.  But such a man would thereby be at once united with his nature; his nature would already pre-exist, and nowhere would he find any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of history could be produced.  Like the animal, whom Marx describes as "immediately at one with its life--activity", he would merge with it and never see it as an onject distinct from himself. (From Infancy and History)

What does it mean to be human?  According to Aristotle, man is the logicoon zoon, the being with speech... yet we are born without speech.  We come into our essence, we aren't born with it.  So in the end, though Helena challenges us with her inabilities, she also shows us what it means to be incomplete, lacking... human.