Table Of Content

The Arachnean and Other Texts L’Arachnéen et autres textes by Fernand Deligny Translated by Drew S. Burk and Catherine Porter as The Arachnean and Other Texts First Edition Minneapolis © 2015, Univocal Publishing Published by Univocal Publishing 123 North 3rd Street, #202 Minneapolis, MN 55401 www.univocalpublishing.com No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Estrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France repésenté aux Etats-Unis. This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program. Photographs: Henri Cassanas Maps: archives Jacques Allaire and Marie-Dominique Guibal Reproductions: Anaïs Masson Designed & Printed by Jason Wagner Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press ISBN 9781937561710 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954259 Table of Contents Introduction 9 31 The Arachnean The Island Below. A Series of Images 115 129 When the-Human-that-We-Are Is Not There 131 That Seeing and Looking at Oneself 137 Acting and the Acted 145 Art, Borders ... and the Outside 149 Card Taken and Map Traced 155 The Fulfilled Child 161 Those Excessives 165 The Human and the Supernatural 171 The Charade 175 Freedom without a Name 183 Pretend Not to Notice 187 The Obligatory and the Fortuitous 193 Connivance 197 The Missing Voice 201 When the-Human-that-We-Are Is Not There Maps and Legends 229 Living between the Lines The organization of this volume by Fernand Deligny highlights its fundamental elements. The stylized way in which the book articulates texts, maps, and photographs allows it to stand, in a sense, as the purified essence of the author’s work, especially of the theoretical and practical inventions he produced in the 1980s. The texts bear upon the stakes of his enterprise in the predominant context of the period, namely, psychoanalysis. Thanks to the photographs, the reader is present at an adventure that ultimately passed through a reflection on images: these are not photos of an experience but rather a certain experience of photography. The maps, finally, present the secret, internal movement of the site: what brought it to life for so long, what it left behind in the form of still unexploited echoes, what establishes the implicit link between life and daily life in the vicinity of madness, the creation of forms resulting from that connivance and the new impulse that derives from it, pointing toward another way of living, a different “common.” The texts produce a different gaze, and that way of seeing makes the texts possible; the life between the lines is the place of articulation between the two. These three sets – texts, maps, images – constitute three equivalent experiences, at once autonomous and highly interdependent: in other words, the same thing presented under three different aspects. The texts do without images, the images do without commentary, and the maps are accompanied by legends only to allow the reader to move beyond the enigma of the first glance more quickly, to grasp the circumstances of their development, and to measure their aptitude to make visible in and of themselves the itineraries that are forgotten as soon as they are experienced, the underlying architecture of the network. Why so many precautions, since the texts themselves offer commentary on images? The paradox is cleared up by the move to articulate the function of images and tracings in the formation of territories in which the real of autism is adjacent to the so badly-named common reality, which is precisely not common to them, to those people; for it to become common, it was necessary to detour by way of maps and 9 images. The detour made it possible to move from a stigmatizing and excluding “those people there” to a “these people, here,” whose position in space then appears in all its singularity and all its sovereignty, in the sense in which Bataille speaks of a souveraineté with no role, no power, no use. In the photographs, which at first glance might appear to be documenting a Scout camp, we very quickly see something else: children alone, children whose mode of being is that of pure presence. About children, one often says, as about dogs, that they “get underfoot,” thereby designating that difficult crisscrossing among divergent modes of activity; worse still when it involves autistic children whose enigmatic agitation creates ripples and underlines their “invasive absence”: absence from “themselves,” absence from the collective project, and absence from normal- ized human life in general. In these pictures, on the contrary, it is not absence that is underlined but a presence, powerful, solitary, yet territorialized in the extreme, in a space fully laid out with landmarks and signs (walls, stones, tubs, posts, a ball of clay suspended from a string) all of which are objects of an intense activity about which we know that, in order to designate its singularity, Deligny had to divert the verb agir (“to act”) and make a noun of it (“acting”), so as to oppose it to the indefinitely conjugated French verb faire (“to do”). Thus the use Deligny was to make of images later on was already announced in 1969: to bring into view what one fails to see, to make visible the power and impor- tance of gestures that usually escape our attention or that we position negatively as forms of meaningless agitation, unplaceable, unusable. Here, on the contrary, these gestures are inscribed in a territory that is no longer that of a deficit but rather that of an “acting” that Deligny sometimes compares to baroque adornments, variations, rituals. Deleuze would have said that, deterritorialized in relation to the territory of pathology called a hospital, they are reterritorialized in an entirely different way: there is a presence of pure, purposeless form. Such is the meaning of the maps, which are eventually replaced by a movie camera. No adult appears in these pictures: questions, forms of address, injunctions, ther- apeutic, educational, and occupational intentions have been withdrawn along with them, to be replaced by things, their arrangement, their scrupulous organization. As in the films Ce gamin, là, and Projet N, the silence that seems to reign in these sites of life must not hide the incessant exchange that takes place by way of space and through the positions of things, an exchange that molds the “living area” into a paradoxical place of “communication” that is suited to this “common” of a different type that includes autistic children and even, in a sense, turns around them, responding to the turning that they carry out tirelessly around us, as if questing, Deligny would say, after the Nous là, the “we there.” The seeming withdrawal of the adults corresponds to a statement that appears at the beginning of Ce gamin, là, as a keyword printed on the film: “It is not a matter of going toward them, of 10