One cannot understand our culture’s conception of the human being unless one remembers that at its foundation lies a man without a childhood: Adam. According to the account in Genesis, the man whom the Lord creates and places in the Garden of Eden is an adult, to whom He speaks and gives commands, and for whom He creates a companion so that he might not be alone. And only an adult, and certainly not an infant, could give a name to all the animals in the garden.
It is hardly surprising that a being without a childhood cannot remain innocent and is fatally destined for guilt and sin. Perhaps the pessimism that condemns the Christian West to constantly postpone happiness and fulfilment to the future stems from this singular deficiency, which makes Adam a being constitutionally devoid of childhood. And it is perhaps because of this lack, more fundamental than any sin, that, on the one hand, childhood is for each of us the place of nostalgia for impossible happiness and, on the other, within social organisation, a defective condition that must be disciplined and trained at all costs. And if psychoanalysis sees in the child the hidden subject of every neurosis, this is perhaps precisely because the Adamic paradigm of a man without childhood is at work within us somewhere.
This means that the recovery from the illness of the West – that is, of an adult culture which, by repressing childhood, ends up condemning itself to childishness – will only be possible if we are able to restore Adam’s childhood.
Giorgio Agamben: Adam’s childhood
One cannot understand our culture’s conception of the human being unless one remembers that at its foundation lies a man without a childhood: Adam. According to the account in Genesis, the man whom the Lord creates and places in the Garden of Eden is an adult, to whom He speaks and gives commands, and for whom He creates a companion so that he might not be alone. And only an adult, and certainly not an infant, could give a name to all the animals in the garden.
It is hardly surprising that a being without a childhood cannot remain innocent and is fatally destined for guilt and sin. Perhaps the pessimism that condemns the Christian West to constantly postpone happiness and fulfilment to the future stems from this singular deficiency, which makes Adam a being constitutionally devoid of childhood. And it is perhaps because of this lack, more fundamental than any sin, that, on the one hand, childhood is for each of us the place of nostalgia for impossible happiness and, on the other, within social organisation, a defective condition that must be disciplined and trained at all costs. And if psychoanalysis sees in the child the hidden subject of every neurosis, this is perhaps precisely because the Adamic paradigm of a man without childhood is at work within us somewhere.
This means that the recovery from the illness of the West – that is, of an adult culture which, by repressing childhood, ends up condemning itself to childishness – will only be possible if we are able to restore Adam’s childhood.
Quodlibet, April 13, 2026