Fernand Deligny and the place of the a-subjected spirit

Abstract

Fernand Deligny, in Le Croire e le craindre (1978), relates Janmari, an autistic child he adopted at the age of 12, to the character Robinson from Michel Tournier's novel entitled Friday or the limbos of the pacific, and Victor of Aveyron, a “wild boy” who was found in a forest in France in the 18th century. We use this relationship to consider the distinction between different human perceptive registers that give rise to different ways of acting in the world. This distinction is corroborated by the existence of human individuals who live outside the register of the subject based on an instinctive and innate dimension of the spirit. Assuming that there is a distinction in Hume's thought between the instance of the spirit and the instance of the subject, our objective will be to discuss the possibility of an a-subjected spirit, or one that does not submit to the structures of the subject, based on Fernand Deligny's experiences with the non-verbal autistic children he lived with in the Cévennes mountains, as well as to consider his critique of the process of domestication operated by language, responsible for forging a model of humanity that has been affirmed throughout the history of civilization and culture.