What shall we call human in humans, the initial misery of their childhood, or their capacity to acquire a ‘second’ nature which, thanks to language, makes them fit to share in communal life, adult consciousness and reason? That the second depends on and presupposes the first is agreed by everyone. The question is only that of knowing whether this dialectic, whatever name we grace it with, leaves no remainder.

Lyotard, “About the Human” The Inhuman p.3