1. At first Spinoza is astonished and perplexed. How could we have begun by being so weak, so unaware of ourselves, so far from the image we have of what a human being needs to be? Can it be that we no longer have anything but an external link with that numb and wholly somnambulistic being that we had formerly been?

2. In order to be able to think childhood correctly, one must first of all avoid the risk of the chimera of the infans adultus in all its avatars: miniaturised adult, first man, hypostasised child as an essence apart. To which we can add the quite real figure of the adult who has not grown up (childishness of the vulgus), the rare and problematic figure of the convalescent amnesiac, over which doubt still lingers (is this a new life or a vestibule of death?), and finally the figure of the adolescent.

3. Now there is, for the first time in philosophy, an active gaze upon chil-dren. Not that it is a matter of loving them, of pitying them their fate, or of being moved by them. Between the humanist fascination with the opaque and snickering world of childhood in the sixteenth century, and the ‘cod-dling’ of a Madame de Sévigné of the eighteenth, and beyond the contradictions of a century of transition in which modernism and archaism coexisted, and were often interlaced with one another, Spinoza treated childhood without scorn or compassion, the child as a being in becoming. The relationship to childhood became the veridical ordeal of a philosophy that meant to grant no validity to the idea of privation, and which triumphed in this ordeal by rectifying the image of childhood, by appropriating it as the best illustration of itself. The child grasped in its becoming, at the end of the Ethics, is the very image, the unique, definitive image, conforming to the understanding, of becoming-philosopher.