Si l’œuvre de Lyotard reste en suspens de son « supplément », qui serait comme « une ligne de résistance » dans la pensée, « l’insu qui hante sa philosophie », il semble bien que celui-ci serait une sorte de « phrase ‘infante’ ». Mais plus profondément, ce travail cherche à montrer que l’enfance est cet inconnu à multiples figures habitant l’œuvre de Lyotard bien avant le tournant du différend. Tissée par un mouvement dérivatif critique entre le langage, la psychanalyse et l’art, la pensée de Lyotard semble soucieuse de toucher la limite entre le système et l’événement, le même et l’autre, la structure et la différence, cette limite où l’hétérogène apparaît comme une force à la fois constitutive et refoulée. C’est justement ce que nous croyons repérer à travers les visages multiples de l’enfance. Ces visages qui ne se réduisent pas l’un à l’autre, se déclinent alors de l’infantile à la minorité et de là à l’infantia, Lyotard cherchant à toucher cet étranger chaque fois avec des instruments différents. Cette façon de lire Lyotard nous semble avoir l’avantage de mettre en relief certains topiques peu explorés de son œuvre, ou encore de voir sous un nouveau jour certains aspects surexploités de cette pensée. Ainsi l’on pourrait varier les travaux sur la pensée de Lyotard vers certains domaines inhabituels actuellement, comme la philosophie de l’éducation ou les études de la performance. / If Lyotard’s work is waiting for its « supplement » which would be like a « resistance line » in the thought, « the unbeknownst haunting his philosophy », it seems that this would be an « ‘infante’ phrase ». More thoroughly, we would like to show that childhood is a multiple figure inhabiting his work even before the turning of the différend. Lyotard’s thought, weaved in a critical derivative movement between language, psychoanalysis and art, seems to be attentive to the limit between the system and the event, the same and the other, the structure and the difference, that limit where the heterogenous appears to be a constitutif yet inhibited force. This is exactly what we hope to map out across the multiple faces of the childhood. Those faces not reducing to each other, vary from the infantile to the minority and from the minority to infantia. Thus Lyotard tries to touch this stranger with an other instrument each time. This way of reading Lyotard seems to have the advantage of highlighting some unexplored topics of his work, or to bring a new light on its over exploited aspects. Thereby we could vary works on Lyotard’s philosophy towards actually unfamiliar domains with it, like the philosophy of education or performance studies

Esta pesquisa sustenta a hipótese de que o conceito do figural, amplamente desenvolvido pelo filósofo Jean-François Lyotard em sua tese de doutorado Discours, Figure de 1971, possui raízes mais arcaicas do que as colocadas em marcha pela discussão estética. Sem suplantar a importância do conceito para a estética, nossa hipótese buscará nos primeiros trabalhos publicados e em arquivos inéditos do autor a ideia de que as questões fundamentais que o conceito busca resolver já estavam colocadas desde 1954, e essas questões eram de cunho político. Assim, buscamos retraçar o caminho que vai da crise do marxismo e da problemática da relação entre teoria e prática ao problema da relação da arte com a política. Mostraremos também que a ponte que uni esses dois momentos é construída através da teoria psicanalítica freudiana. Podemos afirmar que este trabalho constitui-se como uma gênese do conceito do figural. / This research supports the hypothesis that the concept of figural, largely developed by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his 1971s doctoral thesis Discours, Figure has roots more archaic than those put in motion by the aesthetic discussion. Without supplanting the importance of the concept for the aesthetic, our hypothesis will examine the first published works and unpublished author\'s archives the idea that the fundamental questions that the concept seeks to address were already in place since 1954, and these issues were political in nature. Thus, we seek to retrace the path from the crisis of Marxism and the issue of the relationship between theory and practice to the problem of the relashionship between art and politics. We also will show that the bridge that unite these two moments is constructed through Freudian psychoanalytic theory. We can say that this work is constituted as a genesis of the figural concept.