Infans

The essay offers a radical critique of the recapitulation theory, showing that human ontogeny is not a miniature of phylogeny but an autonomous and transfor-mative process. Infancy is conceived as a structural condition of the human species, marked by neoteny: a premature birth and delayed maturation that expose the subject to prolonged evolutionary, cognitive, and historical plasticity. This dual nature—early fragility and extended potential—makes ontogeny a driver of history, rather than its outcome. The temporality of infancy breaks with evolutionary linearity and opens up to discontinuous time, capable of invention and rupture. The infant, without speech and yet bearer of ambivalent potentialities, becomes a figure of exposed, historical, and unfinished subjectivity, continuously rewritten through relations with others and with language.