It is assumed, rightly, in this picture that parenting is a form of aesthetics, that the parents’ attention to their child is organized around what is acceptable and unacceptable to them about the child (the myth of unconditional love is there to conceal this). The parents want to keep their child as ‘beautiful’ as possible, that is, they want their feelings about the child to be as beautiful (that is, acceptable) as possible – and this is something that the child has to of necessity collude with; but the child is also something else, something out of the orbit of the parents’ desire (in this
...more
