El pequeño salvaje

- ¿Qué pasa ahora?
- Acabará muriéndose aquí. No hacen más que exhibirlo como un fenómeno.
- Escuche, Itard. Este niño es un ser inferior. Es peor que un animal.
- Precisamente. A los animales se les cuida, se les educa, ¿por qué no se le puede educar a él también?
- ¿Cree que se le puede educar?
- No lo sé, pero no sirve de nada sacarlo del bosque y encerrarlo aquí como si lo castigaran por haber decepcionado a los parisinos.
- Escúcheme. Yo creo que es retrasado.

L´enfant sauvage. Truffaut.

(...) It is no coincidence that the film of Truffaut takes place in 1798 and in Paris, at the end of the French Revolution, when the concept of “citizen” grasps its highest meaning under the proclamation of the “Declaration of the Righs of Man and of the Citizen”. The dichotomy savage/ civilized, formed during the Age of Enlightenment, will be established as cultural imaginary of the Modern Europe, and the opposites nature/ civilization and rationalism/ irrationality will lead to the separation of the Modern Being from the nature and his/her subordination to the city. This radical fracture entails a new idea of the (modern) Human Being, bound up with the world´s bourgeois concept, based in the “setting up of the Man as lord and master of the nature”. The categorization of the savage as “subject to dominate, domesticate and civilize” just makes sense, therefore, with the learning of the modern dichotomy between Western reason and savage nature.