Ensayos de infancia, o un elogio del juego

Abstract

The present work proposes a reading of the game as a childhood essay, that is, as an experience of forgetting that is recovered. Understood as a procedure, but also as an invention of objects, as a transmutation of values, the game is nothing more than a first way of avoiding usefulness, of ignoring the obedient predisposition of adult morality. From Stevenson's reproaches to the nostalgia set in childhood, passing through Baudelaire's observations regarding the first forms of beauty in toys, to the appropriations of remains that play fosters in children, as Freud testifies, as Benjamin himself points out, behold, playing is an art, or what Cesar Aira calls the earliest documentation of our desire. What it is then about in these pages is to read in the game a prior to everything, a future preposition capable of questioning each new irruption.