If “communication” is for us, today, such an affair– in every sense of the word . . . – if its theories are flourishing, if its technologies are being proliferated, if the “mediatization” of the “media” brings along with it an auto-communicational vertigo, if one plays around with the theme of the indistinctness between the “message” and the “medium” out of either a disenchanted or jubilant fascination, then it is because something is laid bare. What is exposed is the “content”-less web of “communication” . . . We are “ourselves” too inclined to see in this the overwhelming destiny of modernity. Contrary to such meagre evidence, it might be that we have understood nothing about the situation, and rightly so, and that we have to start again to understand ourselves – our existence and that of the world (28).

Let me tender one advocacy that supplements Nancy’s position and stands as clearly antithetical to the goals and aspirations of the “information age”: a particular, ontological plea for illiteracy in a recovery of the most impossible of forms: infancy.

Ruminating on Ovid’s version of the myth of Narcissus, Maurice Blanchot arrives at the image of a marvellous child who is dying. Narcissus, “having turned into an image . . . dissolves in the immobile dissolution of the imaginary, where he is washed away without knowing it, losing a life he does not have” (126). This lost life the infant never had marks a singular passage and a destiny: to die into language without knowing it.

Heidegger famously posits a double negative constitution of human being in the form of a being toward death and a being toward language, both language and death are our unavoidable, irreversible destinies, and somewhere in that transit is a stage named infancy. Infancy inflects pre-subjective intensities in “a pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self ” (Deleuze 2001: 26). It also inflects the more portentous advent of language as an infant’s death. A child emerges from an infant corpse still warm outside, at the limit of the debt of life to living toward language. Already belated, this infant is there as a not-yet-something, and infancy has no survivors precisely because infancy is the non-ground of language withholding that secret of language “language” can never recover. Of course, this scenario that constitutes a primal scene is the happening of a non-event, an impossible event because the infant occupies the space of the imaginary. The phrase an “infant is being killed” is of the order of a phantasmatic designation of a passage in which there is a death of an infant and a one who survives. A recurrent theme in Rilke’s poetry is the disinherited child suspended between two worlds “to whom no longer what’s been, and not yet what’s coming, belongs” (Agamben 43). This remarks the interstitial space of infancy, a brief epoch condemned from the start to a death.