ABSTRACT
A child has just been born. Faced with the emergence of this new life a whole list of questions are triggered. Who is he? Where has he come from? Where was he before being here? Who does he look like? What will he become? Why this child and not another? Birth does not deliver the answer to the mystery of origin. That mystery goes beyond the sole protagonists of procreation. Origin is what cannot be decided. We come from what precedes us, from a whole succession of generations. Is something following its predetermined course? How far back should one go? Is there intentionality in all this? A necessity? Or, on the contrary, does what happens following procreation result from contingency alone? Contingency that can potentially overthrow everything that was before. To the point of touching on absurdity, like the questions Hamm puts to Nagg in Beckett’s play Endgame: Hamm
Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
NaggI didn’t know.
HammWhat? What didn’t you know?
NaggThat it’d be you.” (Beckett, 1958, p. 35)
