Religious Comparison in Fernand Deligny’s Writing on Autism

This paper examines the occasional comparisons between non-speaking autism, intellectual disability, and religious states of self-renunciation in the writings of Fernand Deligny, an experimental educator, writer, and social worker who worked in alternative residential programs for autistic children in 1950s-80s France. His careful, unsentimental reflections on the resemblance between physical states associated with mysticism, such as prostration, kneeling, rocking, and gazing, and the autonomous wandering of non-speaking children in safe, adaptive settings allowed Deligny to illustrate with sensitivity what subjectivities not mediated by language might look and feel like, to safeguard disabled and neurodivergent lives, and to provoke an expansion of the concept of the human. Through an analysis of the intertwined histories of religion and disability in modern Europe that make this comparison possible, I explore the constructive potential of his theories for disabled thought and worldmaking, building on his concepts of the “wander line” and the “a-conscious.”