DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20448401
Everything will Be as it Is Now, just a little Different. Fernand Deligny’s Pedagogy of Wandering
by Sergio Vitale
In 1968, while the streets of Paris were the scene of bitter clashes between the forces of order and those demonstrating against the prevaricating logic of capitalist society, Fernand Deligny chose to begin, in the Cévennes mountains, the experience of working with autistic children that would last until his death in 1996. An essayist and storyteller, as well as a proponent of an unconventional cinema that earned him the esteem of François Truffaut, Deligny also influenced the thinking of philosophers and psychiatrists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In his defence of the mute world of autism from the many fatal traps of the institutions deputed to safeguard social security and so called mental health, he saw in the silence and in the moindres gestes of his children a way out of the symbolic domestication brought about by language, which leads to anonymous identification with the norms and conditions on which the dominant system is based.
INTERNO POI - 2-2024_finale rivisto-137-171