A voz é o que está no meio: infância, linguagem e imaginação

Ana Martins

doi:10.23925/1983-4373.2026i36p5-18

The voice in-between

childhood, language, and imagination

Authors

Ana Martins Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23925/1983-4373.2026i36p5-18

Keywords:

Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Experimentum linguae, Dialectical images, Fabulation

Abstract

This article proposes a philosophical reflection on childhood drawing on the thought of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, understanding it not as a stage of human development, but as an experience of language. Based on scenes involving children, mobilized as dialectical images, the text investigates childhood as experimentum linguae: a relation to language that is not reduced to representation or communication. In this context, voice emerges as a form of mediality, exposing language in its sensible and embodied dimension. In dialogue with Benjamin’s notion of non-sensible similarities, the article approaches childhood experience as a logic of fabulation and metamorphosis, in which word, body, and world remain in relation. Therefore, this study argues that childhood preserves the memory of a non-instrumental language, whose listening opens space for other ways of imagining and inhabiting the world.

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Author Biography

Ana Martins, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ

Ana Carolina Martins é professora do Departamento de Educação Infantil do Colégio Pedro II. Graduada em História pela Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), é mestre em Filosofia pela UFF e doutora em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Integra o Laboratório Filosofias do Tempo do Agora (LAFITA/CNPq). Desenvolve pesquisas em Filosofia contemporânea, com ênfase nos pensamentos de Giorgio Agamben e Walter Benjamin, bem como nos campos da infância, da linguagem e das cosmogonias ameríndias. Atualmente, realiza estágio pós-doutoral no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Filosofia da UFRJ (PPGF-UFRJ), com pesquisa sobre a cosmogonia yanomami e perspectivas para uma educação dos modos de viver.

References

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AGAMBEN, G. Texto sem título. Tradução de Bernardo Romagnoli Bethônico. Gratuita, v.3 – Infância, Novembro de 2017a. p.14-15. Disponível em: https://chaodafeira.com/catalogo/gratuita-v-3-infancia/ Acesso em 26 de julho de 2026.

AGAMBEN, G. O uso dos corpos. Trad. Selvino José Assmann. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017.

BENJAMIN, W. Passagens. Organizador da edição brasileira Willi Bolle. Trad. Irene Aron e Cleonice Paes Barreto Mourão. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG; São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, 2009.

BENJAMIN, W. Sobre a linguagem em geral e sobre a linguagem do homem. In: BENJAMIN, W. Escritos sobre mito e linguagem (1915-1921). Trad. Susana Kampff Lages e Ernani Chaves. São Paulo: Duas Cidades; Ed. 34, 2011.

BENJAMIN, W. Rua de mão única: Infância Berlinense: 1900. Trad. João Barrento. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2013.

CALVINO, I. “Um rei à escuta”. In: CALVINO, I. Sob o sol-jaguar. Trad. Nilson Moulin. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995.

KOPENAWA, D; ALBERT, B. A queda do céu: palavras de um xamã yanomami. Trad. Beatriz Perrone-Moisés. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015.

LISPECTOR, C. Uma Aprendizagem ou O livro dos prazeres. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1998.

TAVARES, G. M. Atlas do corpo e da imaginação: teoria, fragmentos e imagens. Porto Alegre: Dublinense, 2021.

VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, E. Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena. In: VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, E. A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia. São Paulo: Ubu Editora, 2020.

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Published

2026-07-31

How to Cite

Martins, A. (2026). The voice in-between: childhood, language, and imagination. FronteiraZ. Journal of the Postgraduate Studies in Literature and Literary Criticism Program, 1(36), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.23925/1983-4373.2026i36p5-18

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Vol. 1 No. 36 (2026): Infância. Infantil. Literatura: mediações

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Submission of articles: FronteiraZ 37 - 50 years of the military coup in Argentina – literature and the authoritarian experience in the Southern Cone

June 9, 2026

50 years of the military coup in Argentina – literature and the
authoritarian experience in the Southern Cone

Amanda Lacerda de Lacerda - Universidade estadual de Campinas
Leonardo da Silva Claudiano - Pontifícia Universidade católica de São Paulo
Valéria Gomes Ignácio da Silva - Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

In 2026, the civil-military coup, which introduced in Argentina one of the most
violent and systematic regimes of political repression in Latin America, reaches its 50th
anniversary. Not only does this anniversary invite remembrance but also reflection on
the ways through which literature has constituted a privileged space for denunciation,
symbolic elaboration of violence and resistance to the erasure imposed by authoritarian
states.
The Argentinian intellectual tradition focused on interpreting this period and its
reverberations is widely recognised through the work of authors such as Beatriz Sarlo,
Ricardo Piglia, Josefina Ludmer, Elizabeth Jelin, Nora Strejilevich, among others, who
pruduced critical, essayistic, testimonial and literary texts about memory and its
crossings between the past and the present of the military dictatorship.
The Southern Cone dictatorships – Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay – prove
to be a fertile terrain for investigating the modes through which extreme historical
experience is inscribed in language. Latin-American literature, with special emphasis on
the period after the year 2000, has grappled with this “insidious cloud” (Sarlo, 2005,
p.9), seeking to give it contour and to invest it with meanings that contribute to an
understanding of the present.
In the works of such writers as Félix Bruzzone, Nona Fernández, Marcelo
Rubens Paiva, Renato Tapajós, Mário Benedetti, Fernanda Trias, Alejandro Zambra,
Marta Dillon, among others, reality does not present itself as a transparent given, but
rather as a construction under tension from traumas, silences, fragmentations and
disputes over meanings. The different forms of realism – in its variations, impasses and
divisions – operate as narration strategies capable of unmasking the discourse of power
and reelaborating the traumatic experience.
This dossier proposes to gather articles that examine literature as a mode of
denunciation and remembrance of Latin American dictatorships, by considering both
works produced under that regime and those written in the post-dictatorship period,
when memory, testimony and rewriting of the past become central fields of symbolic
dispute.

In this issue of Revista FronteiraZ, we hope to receive contributions
problematizing and updating the debate on representations of trauma related to Latin
American dictatorships. In that sense, we welcome transdisciplinary proposals
discussing – but not limiting to – the following themes:
- Intersection among history, memory, forgetting, imagination, and affects
experienced under dictatorial regimes through literature and/or other artistic
forms;
- Comparative approaches to literary works engaged in memory works from the
1000s to the present, and institutional, journalistic, cultural discourses, among
others, that produce tensions and re-readings of the history of dictatorships;
- Language experiences (self-writing, montage, biography, essay, staging,
performing, dramatization etc) in the representation of traumas produced by the
Southern Cone dictatorships through literature and/or other artistic forms;
- Contemporary narrative and/or poetic productions within the scope of accounts
of affiliation and the dynamics of generational transmission of experience under
authoritarian regimes.
- Comparative approaches among Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan
literature from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective.
Deadline for submission of articles: June 30/2026

The voice in-between

childhood, language, and imagination

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Author Biography

Ana Martins, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ

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Submission of articles: FronteiraZ 37 - 50 years of the military coup in Argentina – literature and the authoritarian experience in the Southern Cone

Chamada PRORROGADA - FronteiraZ 36: Infância. Infantil. Literatura: mediações

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