Fernand Deligny Research Articles

Unconjugating Community with Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy

This article takes as its point of departure unexpected similarities in the ways that the experimental educator, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualize community. Deligny is remembered for his alternative community for non-speaking children with autism, established in the Cévennes in 1967 and founded on the absence of language and relationality as it is commonly understood. This article probes the paradox that in this community we find a rapprochement with Nancy's relational ontology. Drawing on Deligny's theoretical responses to the dynamics he witnessed and the cartographical methods employed to trasce the movements of the children as they roamed, and placing these in dialogue with Nancy's texts on community through the decades, I suggest a kinship between the two thinkers which opens onto broader questions about the relationship between theories and practices of community.

Putting the pandemic on the table: what does this crisis reveal about the essence of education?

ABSTRACT The period March 2020–March 2021 marks the time reference for this theoretical study as it denotes the initial surge of the Pandemic, where whole societies were destabilized by the ferocity of Covid-19. Within this context, I posit COVID-19 as a transforming event: one that exhausts worlds. Drawing from Jan Masschelein’s works on Arendt and the architecture of public education, the question at hand is how does Covid-19, as a transforming event, affect and change the very essence of education? I begin by comparing two definitions of crisis, Arendt’s notion of krisis, with philosopher Peter Pal Pelbart’s thinking around crisis, illness, and ‘exhaustion.’ I conclude by identifying an ‘inconsequential’ architectural space, a ‘spandrel.’ This spatial by-product, revealed during the Pandemic, is located within the very design of the ‘perfect’ public school, schole: the Arendtian ‘table.’ This spandrel aligns with Fernand Deligny’s ‘primordial communism.’

Web Walking, the Landscape Pattern and Place-story Diagrams in Performance

In this article we (artist-researchers Crab & Bee) describe a process of tracking minerals and strands of significance through three contrasting landscapes (Llaneirwg/St Mellons in the Cardiff suburbs, the Hemmerdon mine between Plymouth and Dartmoor, and the Seaton River in Cornwall) using a performative and hyper-sensitized web walking. The paper explains the plotting of these strands onto a geographical pattern, grounded by what anthropologist Gilbert Simondon has described as beacons of immersive orientation or ‘privileged points’ and, at the same time, onto an emergent pattern of stories that unevenly connects the three sites. We then describe how we drew on such connective strands, stories and patterns to create a diagram for a performance, Webs, Nets and a Carrier Bag, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, in September 2021, as part of celebrations for the launch of Making routes: journeys in performance 2010 – 2020 (Triarchy Press). The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.

Bebês, materialidade e objetos técnicos na primeira infância no brasil e na frança

The main objective of this work is to discuss the materiality of relationships and experiences of infants in early childhood education, based on a dialogue with the Brazilian curriculum guidelines for Early Childhood Education in 3 municipalities in the state of São Paulo, and with the concepts of technical objects and individuation developed by Simondon. This is a qualitative research that uses bibliographic and documentary research as a methodology and the production of cartographies of scenes in which relationships between babies and objects are observed. The cartography used here is inspired by the records developed by Fernand Deligny (2015) and its appropriation for research with babies, as proposed by Julia Oliveira (2016). Research was carried out on this topic in the field of education, going through scientific articles and guiding documents for early childhood education. The authors mapped the paths and affections of babies and their relationships with objects in two distinct scenes that were collected within the scope of a collective project. It is a work that contributes to early childhood education in general and, specifically, to baby studies (Infantology, Babyhood studies).

Spectral Animals: Deligny’s Autistic Vision and the Presence of the Immortal (Non)Human

Citing essays and films by the French experimental educator and writer Fernand Deligny, this article explores how discourses of visibility and invisibility inform comparisons between nonhuman perception and the forms of “vision” attributed to the autism spectrum. Drawing on Derrida’s work, I argue that Deligny places both animals and autistic people on the opposite side of a “spectral” threshold in relation to the neurotypical human. These nonnormative subjects “regularly [exceed] all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible” (Derrida 117). In the French language, which translates “autism spectrum disorder” as “le trouble du spectre autistique,” this excess (which also pertains to the “spectrum” of the visible) is manifest on a semantic level. The rise of “hauntological” readings informed by Derrida’s work on “le spectre” in Spectres de Marx and Échographies de la télévision therefore requires us to locate and to deconstruct the “autistic specter” that poses such “trouble” for literary and medical narrative. What this particular specter “haunts,” I argue, is a definition of the human as a subject that possesses, in contrast to nonhuman animals and machines, a unique capacity to create and interpret narrative.

The space of care: Fernand Deligny, Renaud Victor and the making of Ce gamin, là (1975)

ABSTRACT This essay attends to the 1975 documentary film Ce gamin, là, a collaboration between educator Fernand Deligny, filmmaker Renaud Victor and the inhabitants of the para-institutional space of care for non-verbal autistic children that Deligny established in the Cévennes in the late 1960s. Less a documentary illustrative of ways of caring for autistic children than an experiment in observational filmmaking as an enactment of care, Ce gamin, là provides an articulation of care renewed through embodied and situated connections among filmmakers, participants and viewers and actualised in the fostering of alternative political communities, ways of living together across abilities and new modalities of viewership.

Contra os limites da linguagem, a ética da imagem

Como nos autistas com quem trabalhou por muitos anos, para Fernand Deligny a imagem se contrapõe à linguagem pois recusa aquilo que esta carrega: sentido, mensagem, finalidade, palavras de ordem. Na sua teorização sobre o estatuto da imagem, Deligny dá a essa recusa uma dimensão ética e política.

Contra os limites da linguagem, a ética da imagem

Como nos autistas com quem trabalhou por muitos anos, para Fernand Deligny a imagem se contrapõe à linguagem pois recusa aquilo que esta carrega: sentido, mensagem, finalidade, palavras de ordem. Na sua teorização sobre o estatuto da imagem, Deligny dá a essa recusa uma dimensão ética e política.

Rethinking repetition in dementia through a cartographic ethnography of subjectivity

This article critically engages with the predominant understandings of repetitive bodily practices within a dementia context. Rather than interpreting such practices as pathological and abnormal, I instead approach them through an ethnographic mapping, paying particular attention to the affective dynamics of repetition. Critically developing Fernand Deligny’s insights and methods of tracing and mapping bodily movements in dialogue with Tim Ingold’s notion of dwelling, I demonstrate affect-underpinned encounters and interactions of repetitive phenomena. I then argue for the extension of recent anthropological discussions about affect, repetition, and subjectivity by suggesting a more productive dialogue among theories of affect, body, atmosphere, cognition, memory, language, and life history.

The Children Estranged from Language: Fernand Deligny, in His Time, and against Lacan

After working as a special education teacher for children labeled ‘severely retarded and ineducable’ at the Armentières asylum (1939–43), and after his participation in La Grande Cordée (The Great Cord) – a chain of alternative ‘open hosting centers’ for juvenile delinquents (1948–62) – Deligny began the Cévennes network (1967–86) where he created an environment amenable to autistic children. The aim of this ‘attempt’ was to take into account all of the consequences of autistic children's estrangement from the universe of language by constructing a living environment based on the positivity of this world-outside-language, rather than in any effort to compensate for alleged deficiencies. The unique nature of this attempt should not prevent us from situating it ‘in the context of his century.’ First, we contextualize this attempt within its historically concrete conditions, meaning in relation to the pedagogical and psychiatric institutions Deligny confronted, as well as, notably, Maud Mannoni's school at Bonneuil. Then, we situate Deligny in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis, which defined the subject's formation through its access to the symbolic or to language, and for which autism represented the failure of this symbolic structuring. In this article, we take measure of the effects of these demarcations by examining Deligny's complex relationship with Lacan.

Psychoanalysis Confronts Cognitive Disability

This essay outlines key moments in the long history of psychoanalysis’ deeply problematic engagement with the phenomenon of cognitive disability – as it highlights as well the work of exceptional counter-examples, including Fernand Deligny, Maud Mannoni, and Angelo Villa.

Reinventing Play

In postwar France, the definition of play helped to situate the meaning of childhood in a manner that marginalized disabled children from the common understanding of childhood. Three thinkers—Françoise Dolto, Maud Mannoni, and Fernand Deligny—all advocated more nuanced and open definitions of play that allowed for the recognition of disabled children’s forms of play, which often operated outside of social norms. In their practices, each of these thinkers articulated new interpretations of play that expanded its meaning in social and therapeutic contexts. This recognition was important in questioning the isolation of disabled children, in identifying their belonging among other children, and in revealing the changing boundaries of definitions of childhood.

Os educadores franceses Célestin Freinet e Fernand Deligny

This article is part of the theoretical-conceptual study of the postdoctoral research project. In order to carry out this project it was necessary to refer to new French school thinkers and educators Celestin Freinet (1896-1966) and Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). Both Freinet and Deligny were communists, participated in World War I, and lived the forces of the new French school. However, these three similarities, political, historical, and educational, had different impact on their pedagogies. Thus, this paper is not intended to compare them; it aims to value their pedagogies and, in some way, honor these two 20th. This text intends to identify some biographical movements of these educators and to show their main pedagogical concepts: Freinet the free expression, Deligny the cartography.

The slightest gesture: deligny, the ritornello and subjectivity in socially just pedagogical praxis

Positing existence in terms of difference and becoming as substantive, Gilles Deleuze and FA©lix Guattari are interested in ways of thinking and being that lie outside of institutionalised knowledge and the semiotic chains and regimes of power that sustain it. Although this line of thinking is not applied to pedagogy itself in a sustained manner in their work, their consideration of milieu and cartography, as related to subjectivity, can make an invaluable contribution to pedagogical praxis. In this paper, I diffractively read Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on subjectivity through the writings and practices of Fernand Deligny. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Deligny was known for rejecting standardised forms of knowledge, instruction, and living, placing instead an emphasis on modes of being that lie outside the preexisting norms of the Symbolic Order and the dominance of language. It is, in part, from Deligny’s practices that Deleuze and Guattari derived their method of cartography which can map subjectivity as “wander lines” and gestures within a social milieu. Together with territory, rhythm and the refrain (ritournelle), I think here about wander lines, gestures and milieu as part of a philosophical approach for effectuating socially just pedagogies in higher education, particularly in the context of the recent Fallist movement in South Africa.

Reading Deleuze and Guattari through Deligny’s theatres of subjectivity: Mapping, Thinking, Performing

This article aims to show how Fernand Deligny’s thought and practices with autistic children, as well as his impact on Deleuze and Guattari, offer a paradigm of subjectivity that in turn rests upon an aesthetic and political account of what we can shape and share in common with autistic people. Well known by French educators and followers of alternative psychiatry, Fernand Deligny remains quite unknown in English-speaking parts of academia (a first translation of some of his texts should be published in 2015) despite his influence on the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, Deligny’s proposals are of great interest for renewing how we think about subjectivity.

Living in the presence of others: towards a reconfiguration of space, asylum and inclusion

One of the core characteristics of inclusionary discourses and practices is their emphasis on living in the presence of others. Despite this self-evident character, the question of what is understood by living in the presence of others only sporadically has been the object of critical inquiry. By turning ourselves towards Stengers’ conceptual figure of the idiot and the work of a rather unknown French educator Fernand Deligny, we – opposed to what contemporary scholars and professionals tend to think – will argue that space still occupies an important role in inclusive discourses and practices. Deligny’s remarkable reappraisal of the word ‘asylum’ in particular seems fruitful in order to think the relations between space, inclusion and living in the presence of others anew. In line with Stengers’ idiot, Deligny’s polishing of the word ‘asylum’ leads to an alternative presentation of inclusion as something which has to do with creating (1) spatial interstices in one’s own thinking while living in the presence of others, and (2) places where the other can find refuge against the dominant languages of divergent contemporary professionals and disciplines.

Fernand Deligny : l'agir au lieu de l'esprit

Fernand Deligny : Acting in stead of Thinking. Places of the mind are places of meaning, which are often understood as places of speech. What then about autistic children, who are mute— those with whom Fernand Deligny has lived and thought ? Seeking to be involved with them in a network, Deligny promotes intransitive acting ; that is, he promotes a form of acting that goes against doing and the intention of doing, which are the matter of the conscious and willing mind. With autistic children, we learn that acting is more archaic than thinking – acting takes the place of thinking, and takes place where the mind would have lied. However, there is also an acting psychical nature where the mind lies, an automatism of the mind that acts as an automatic guiding device, one which keeps track and frames its own place, in relation to others.

In Early Childhood: What's language about?

This paper argues that in daycare centres in France, where children are cared for from four months to age three, the competence of female staff members is usually denied and unvalued vis à vis the expert opinions. The paper highlights empirical research on early childhood and gender, providing pragmatic access to children's languages of desire, a language mostly ignored. Incorporating the ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the paper draws upon the conceptualization of Fernand Deligny who took care of autistic children in mapping what he called ‘lines of wandering’, an idea that shows how desire can become accessible. In the present ‘society of control’ which Deleuze analyses and which coexists with Foucault's discipline and biopower, such lines of flight enable the emergence of a new narrative for young children's desire, and for the competence of the female staff members in their departure from the highway of normalization.