The mistrust of genius, which is gradually falling into disrepute under the influence of scientific positivism, or of models of artistic creativity that dispense with any notion of inspiration, often targets child prodigies: for example, the exceptional young calculators studied by Alfred Binet, the young Sartre as he paints himself in his memoirs, or the young poetess Minou Drouet targeted by the press in the 1950s and commented on by Barthes. But this imposture also served as a pretext for others (Derrida, Cixous) to rethink and relaunch the notion of genius by incorporating the phenomenon that seemed most opposed to it.
Thinking about genius thus takes the form of a series of reinventions triggered by the various vicissitudes that seem to give it its durability.
