Fernand Deligny, The Arachnian and Other Texts

How to exist in the eyes of those who don’t look at us? Based on his unique experience in caring for autistic children, the French poet and pedagogue Fernand Deligny explores other ways of life: open to circumstances, full of intersections, exchanges and encounters — living in a network, as in a kind of spider’s web. No wonder Deligny left his mark on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially on the concept of rhizome. Throughout the fifteen essays in this collection — organized by Sandra Alvarez de Toledo and with an afterword by the psychoanalyst Bertrand Ogilvie — it is possible to glimpse the radical nature of her thought, both through her poetic, aphoristic and acute writing, and through her cartographies — a device astute to debunk the primacy of language. It is in this non-invasive approach, without interpretation or “interpellation”, at a deliberate distance in relation to psychoanalysis, that Deligny traverses the silent space-time in which children who do not speak, who vibrate in the face of the brightness of the water and who grab the bees by the bees, live. wings, without hurting them. [ more ]