Fernand Deligny / Multitudes magazine, 24, spring 2006

Janmari, Yves, the “graine de crapule,” the “vagabonds efficaces“: the “difficult” children with whom Fernand Deligny lived were for him so many signposts showing the extent of the problem of the common. Making the common is not a problem that can be solved by language, by obeying orders, by imitating leaders. There are small and big ones who don’t say no, who do otherwise, who go around in circles, who read the law upside down or who walk the ground in their own way. Usually they get caught, and once, and again, locked up. The social is made in the economy, in the norm, it has nothing in common with the common, with the reception of everyone. The social separates the wheat from the chaff, the social sorts, the deserving lot. And it manufactures remains, “the scum” [crapule] in the etymological sense of the word; these remains for Deligny are discoveries, the appearance of the other, of what counts in life.