This chapter looks into the role played by children in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical thought. It charts some key occurrences of child figures in Deleuze's oeuvre and coalesces them into a philosophical persona whose story unfolds against the backdrop of two main Deleuzian projects: metaphysics and political philosophy. The aim of the argument is twofold: to give an account of the ontological and political status of children as seen through a Deleuzian lens, and to elucidate some of Deleuze's more vague philosophical notions using the important yet somewhat neglected figure of the child.

The first part of this chapter portrays the child figure that Deleuze considers a veritable Spinozist, and attends to the ways this child comes to embody some of Deleuze's key metaphysical concepts. In the second part the philosophical landscape changes dramatically to a political one, exposing a radically different facet in the Deleuzian child figure, who now appears as a mere Son or Daughter – a subjugated subject entangled in power relations that are governed by parental figures. The third and last part renders the notion of becoming-child a micropolitical tool at the disposal of an adult, who is called on to undo the parent-function and wrest the child metaphysician portrayed in the first part from the web of political constraints depicted in the second part.

The Spinozist Child: A Metaphysical Journey

Philosophy had always been Deleuze's primary interest – from his early commentaries on other philosophers such as Hume, Nietzsche, Kant and Spinoza, via his two patently philosophical tracts Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, to his later intellectual experimentations with Félix Guattari and his excursions into literature, art and cinema, all of which manifest a philosophical drive and a philosophical method. What lies at the heart of his philosophical endeavours is always metaphysics, that old philosophical inquiry into Being, Thought and their interrelations. That was his explicit project: ‘I feel I am a pure metaphysician,’ he said in 1981 (Deleuze 2007: 42). In fact, some see this enduring metaphysical quest as the very thing that singles Deleuze out from his contemporaries (Smith 2003: 50).