Fernand Deligny and the silent traces of different ways of being human

Abstract

Throughout his career, both in French institutions and in non-institutional experiences, Fernand Deligny dedicated himself to affirming singular ways of relating to the world, far removed from the hegemonic standards that establish majority modes of existence. It was in the Cévennes mountains, however, in contact with non-verbal autistic children, that he was able to experiment with practices focused on the incomprehensible that permeated those relationships. Faced with individuals who distanced themselves from the symbolic norms forged by millennia of domestication, Deligny proposed rethinking the very idea of humanity. The absence of language required a different regime of perception and coexistence, in which the centrality of the word as a mediator and giver of meaning was undone. This article proposes to analyze the main devices used by Deligny in place of linguistic interpretation: writing, the camera, and maps. Through them, he sought to account for the incomprehensible that surrounded his relationship with the children in the Cévennes. We will see how the silent traces left in space and time were valued, clues to a presence that did not fit into the conventional molds of subjectivity.