About Fernand Deligny | École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine

Since the publication of Fernand Deligny’s works in 2007 by Éditions L’Arachnéen, we are witnessing a rediscovery of t author and his work. For more than fifty years, Deligny worked with children and young people on the margins, considered by medical, social and legal circles as “maladjusted.” In 1967, Deligny and others moved to the Cévennes region of France to create a network of places to care for autistic children. Although they did not have a therapeutic or reeducational aim in mind, they developed a series of clinical, aesthetic and anthropological devices. We propose to analyze in detail these different devices –writing, cartography and filming– in order to understand the daily practices developed to live with autistic children. We then propose to see how these practices were constantly inhabited by research, from which Deligny was able to build a very particular philosophical reflection. This reflection, based on the concept of “human” and on a radical critique of all forms of humanism, is both quite singular and deeply embedded in the debates of his time –notably in the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary French philosophy” (Marlon Miguel). 

Marlon Miguel was responsible for the classification of the Deligny archives held at the IMEC, as part of the development of his dissertation À la marge et hors-champ: l’humain dans la pensée de Fernand Deligny (2016). He is currently pursuing his research at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin.