Abstract
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.
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Notes
See the controversy raised by the French documentary Le mur (the French documentary Le mur, released in 2011), which compares behavioral and psychoanalytic treatments of autism, and which was sued by three French psychoanalysts appearing in the movie. The case is explained in D. Jolly, S. Novak, ‘A French Film Takes Issue With the Psychoanalytic Approach to Autism’, The New York Times, 19 January 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/film-about-treatment-of-autism-strongly-criticized-in-france.html?pagewanted=all.
The focus on ‘autistic spectrum disorders’ has also increased attention on multiple factors that could cause or be related to some autistic disorders – see for instance the research on autism and nutrition (Adams and Conn, 1997; Adams et al, 2011).
The literature about Deligny hesitates about the title of the movie, which is sometimes written Ce gamin-là, sometimes Ce gamin, là, both expressions being homophonic in French. The first spelling means ‘that kid’ and the second ‘that kid, there’. Deligny, who voiced the movie, makes us hear at first the more traditional expression ‘ce gamin-là’, but the intertitle at 4′25″ is ‘ce gamin, là’. This deliberate confusion is significant as it enacts the displacement, in Deligny’s thought, from a designative, pronominal conception of subjectivity to a spatial one. See the first 50 min of the movie at www.youtube.com/watch?v=i20VWKO9Sdk.
Lignes d’erre is not easy to translate into English. In French, the verb errer means ‘to wander’, but also sounds like the substantive aire, which designs an ‘area’ – pointing out the spatial dimension of this mode of thinking. However, in A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi translates it as ‘lines of drift’, while Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam translate the same concept mentioned in the Dialogues as ‘lines of wandering’ (see Manning, 2011). In the frame of this article, I will stick to ‘wander lines’, which is the translation proposed in Alvarez de Toledo (2013) although, as Manning argues, the sense of ‘drift’ has the advantage to refer to non-human activations as well as to human ones.
LAPS stands for ‘Laboratoire des Arts et Philosophies de la Scène’ (see labo-laps.com/).
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Acknowledgements
The author is deeply grateful to all people who helped and encouraged her at every step in the writing of this paper: two anonymous reviewers; people from the ‘performance philosophy’ working session at the ASTR 2013 conference in Dallas, TX; staff and students of the Master in Speculative Narration program at the Ecole de recherche graphique (Brussels); members of the GECo (group for constructivist studies, ULB-Brussels); Chantal Alexandre; Didier Debaise; Alex Feldman; Valérie Glansdorff; Ursula Roessiger; and Isabelle Stengers.
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Wiame, A. Reading Deleuze and Guattari through Deligny’s theatres of subjectivity: Mapping, Thinking, Performing. Subjectivity 9, 38–58 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.18