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Document Details : Title: Circumstances, Becoming, Body Subtitle: Autism and Space in Fernand Deligny's Tentative in the Cévennes Author(s): DESMET, Thibault Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 86 Issue: 4 Date: 2024 Pages: 579-617 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.86.4.3294482 Abstract : Based on the experience of living together with mute and autistic individuals combined with observing them intensively, Fernand Deligny and his fellows initiated a particular vocabulary on the interaction between both the autistic and non-autistic body and the space in which they lived. This happened in several ‘living areas’ in the mountainous landscape of the French Cévennes, sometimes around indoor environments and sometimes right in the middle of nature. Confronted with non-verbal beings that showed a profound permeability for the concrete, material circumstances around them, Deligny put the emphasis on the investigation of those ‘common’ spatial circumstances and how they were used and functioned. The observations of the gestures and movements of the autistic individuals and the ‘close presences’, using cartography and the film camera, gave information on which living areas were apt and how its spaces could or should be maintained. During the thirty years of the ‘tentative’, the team created and used concepts such as lignes d’erre, chevêtre, repèrer, corps commun, coutumier and asile. This text explains Deligny’s discourse on autism and investigates the interaction between the spatial circumstances, the autistic individuals and the ‘close presences’, and how the spatial vocabulary emerged and functioned in the ‘tentative’. |
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