Spectral Animals: Deligny’s Autistic Vision and the Presence of the Immortal (Non)Human

Abstract

Citing essays and films by the French experimental educator and writer Fernand Deligny, this article explores how discourses of visibility and invisibility inform comparisons between nonhuman perception and the forms of “vision” attributed to the autism spectrum. Drawing on Derrida’s work, I argue that Deligny places both animals and autistic people on the opposite side of a “spectral” threshold in relation to the neurotypical human. These nonnormative subjects “regularly [exceed] all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible” (Derrida 117). In the French language, which translates “autism spectrum disorder” as “le trouble du spectre autistique,” this excess (which also pertains to the “spectrum” of the visible) is manifest on a semantic level. The rise of “hauntological” readings informed by Derrida’s work on “le spectre” in Spectres de Marx and Échographies de la télévision therefore requires us to locate and to deconstruct the “autistic specter” that poses such “trouble” for literary and medical narrative. What this particular specter “haunts,” I argue, is a definition of the human as a subject that possesses, in contrast to nonhuman animals and machines, a unique capacity to create and interpret narrative.

Keywords:

• Autism
• animals
• anthropocentrism
• disability
• Deligny
• Derrida

Notes

1 Le Moindre Geste, directed by Jean-Pierre Daniel, Fernand Deligny, and Josée Manenti, SLON, 1971.

2 “What proves to be difficult in this enterprise is to work in agreement with the psychoanalysts (Mannoni, Dolto, etc.) when what interests me is ‘the innate,’ which is of a different nature than the unconscious” (translation mine).

3 “I think that what is buried inside each of us, and is ‘discovered’ in the psychotic child, is misrecognized, because to recognize the innate is to recognize the animal that we are, animal for which ‘the sign’ responds to a specific need, hence speech. For me, speech is just one type of sign among the possible signs” (translation mine). It is worth noting that, although some of the children in Deligny’s care would likely meet today’s definitions of psychosis, the term was, at the time he wrote to Milhau, still used as a shorthand for what would later be labeled as autism. Given that he is discussing children who lack speech, I take the liberty of assuming that at least some of the children to whom he refers here would be considered autistic today. Deligny starts using the word “autiste” by the time he writes L’Arachnéen.

4 “Think for a moment in the real. It is owing to the fact that the word elephant exists in their language, and hence that the elephant enters into their deliberations, that men have been capable of taking, in relation to elephants, even before touching them, decisions which are more far-reaching for these pachyderms than anything else that has happened to them throughout their history, the crossing of a river or the natural devastation of a forest. With nothing more than the word elephant and the way in which men use it, propitious or unpropitious things, auspicious things, in any event catastrophic things have happened to elephants… Besides, it is clear, all I need do is talk about it, there is no need for them to be here, for them to really be here, thanks to the word elephant, and to be more real than the contingent elephant-individuals” (Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan 178, quoted in Burk 132).

5 “With nothing more than the word elephant and the way in which men use the word, catastrophic things happen to elephants. With nothing more than the word ‘man’…etc….With nothing more than the pronoun ‘he’…etc….” (Burk 132).

6 “I have said this: we are on the threshold: depending on the moment, the stone is cold, hot, burning. Within the scope of our gaze, one or another of these children who is perhaps no more an individual than an elephant is. Unity lies in the species” (Burk 133).

7 “The ‘scope’ [‘portée’] of our gaze, the gaze that comes and goes of its accord […] What may this gaze of ours have to reproduce, what is it loaded with, and by whom? What does it project, and with what force….” (Burk 134).

8 “As for what it [the gaze] allows us to note, there is the obvious risk of always having the subject as the key signature. To change the scope of our gaze since we are dealing with children living (within) the vacancy of this S [Subject], which allows what is being hominized to be distinguished from the real” (134). The initial S refers back to a diagram Deligny introduces at the beginning of the chapter in which he writes this.

9 “strives to garner from the SELF a bit of respect for the THIS” (Burk 136).

10 “The suburb that blessed you all of that/[…]to all those who blessed me that day[…]/Amen!/[…]to benefit up there / the suburb that killed us / I bless you everyone / […]Give us my coffin! / Die to us the sky up there / Die to us the earth / o sky and all of that!” (translation mine).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham L. Bishop

Graham Bishop received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in fall 2021. His dissertation, “Spectral Animals: Autobiographical Strategies for 21^st-Century Humans,” examines contemporary Francophone and Anglophone literature to reveal the roles animals play in humans’ acts of self-definition. He has published scholarly work in MLN and is currently writing a speculative fiction novel in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Alabama.