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Paper short abstract

The article discusses a performative relation between well-being, movement and space by developing a sustained encounter with the cartographic practice of Fernand Deligny.

Paper long abstract

In 1967, after working with Jean Oury and Félix Guattari at the clinic La Borde, Fernand Deligny establishes a place of co-living, receiving mute children, diagnosed with infantile autism in the rural Cévennes in southern France: children, labelled as unbearable, highly psychotic and incurable.

Assembling philosophical, anthropological and artistic perspectives, Deligny's explores a mode of living together that respects the singularity of each individual »outside of what functions in the symbolic mode« (Deligny, 2015: 206). Deligny's work can be situated at the intersection of (1) a critique of the psychiatric dispositif, centred on knowing and curing the pathological and (2) a search for an associated milieu of the common that is constituted as resonance of gestures: those of the children and those of the adults who take care of them. In order to explore a common milieu where everyone can exercise her/his own normativity, Deligny develops an experimental cartographic practice: He draws maps of the children's drifting movements (dérives) within space, of perceptions and gestures such as cooking or cleaning the dishes.

The article examines how Deligny's cartography explores a radical counter architecture of co-living, an open milieu, structured along movements between places of attractions. I shall argue that

Deligny's cartographic practice develops a political proposal as a ›politics of the common‹ that

encounters the common not as given share but as pathic individuation of a network of acts.

Deligny, Fernand (2015) The Arachnean and other texts. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.