Édito My Way 9 : Choosing the living rather than the mortification of language

It is neither with the amendment to the “Equality and Citizenship Act”[1] which came into force in France in January 2017, prohibiting spanking, (thus, as with 31 out of 47 countries of the Council of Europe, bringing into law “non-violent” education,) nor with the protocols and evaluations of good practice(s), that the children in our charge will find their way in the world.

In effect, with these two pitfalls looming large, there is the ideal of shaping each one of us into a smooth thing without any symptomatic roughness, and thereby, in depriving us of a linguistic framework to treat the real at stake, ignoring our condition of parlêtre.

Claude Oger’s rooms are in each instance “customised” in order to treat that which is most singular, buried by a protocolised social discourse in which young subjects, as with workers, are pinned down.

Cécile Wojnarovski, in referring to Michel Foucault’s “Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975”, indicates that existence itself has been reduced to a pathological abnormality.

The evocation, by Donika Balabanova, of Larry Clarke’s film “Kids” reveals the indomitable that each one attempts to tame.

Milena Popova and Bilyana Mechkunova propose, each time – in order that young girls may avoid the worst -, a space to weave an unprecedented bridge between two disjointed discourses.

Finally, a conversation at CIEN (Centre Interdisciplinaire sur l’EHfant), facilitated by Claudine Valette, offers parents a space to find their way to respond to a battery of tests to which they are subjected.

As in the film “My Life as a Courgette”[2], the authors of My Way 9 seek to (re)circulate the living of language from beneath its mortifying rubble.

[1] http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/12/30/a-partir-de-2017-on-ne-fesse-plus_1538187

[2] Barras, C., (Dir.). My Life as a Courgette. France and Switzerland: Gebecka Films. 2016.

Translated by Raphael Montague