Childhood and foreignty: two alterities, the same minority

Abstract

This article deals with the dialectical relationship between childhood and foreignness, considering childhood as a form of migration to a new phase of life and the migrant as a type of child that needs support to be integrated into the new space. How do the two conditions of alterity come together in their subjective symbolic aspects? From the sense of minority and minority of Deleuze and Guattari, we reflect on what makes the child a non-social subject and the foreigner a non-citizen. On the one hand is the foreigner who does not know the codes that must be assimilated for their integration, without the right to full speech, which demands protection. On the other, the child who arrives in the world in the condition of being fragile, precarious and inferior. Through the abductive method, we raise questions about the situation of the migrant child in psychological, political and philosophical aspects. Could it be that, like a barbarian (read: foreigner, migrant, refugee), who only knows how to babble in the society that welcomes him, this child has reinforced his dimension as a minor subject, speechless and invisible subject? After all, what kind of foreigner is the migrant child?