The Arachnean and Other Texts Quotes

“And the human then appears as being what remains, somewhat in tatters, of the Arachnean traversed by the sort of blind meteorite that is consciousness”
― Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts

“Anyone who has lived for a long while in an insane asylum where a good number and
variety of individuals and children are confined will have in memory the full spectrum of ritual stances from the various religions, present and past, as if brought to their culmination.

Some see a parody here, since the individuals in question are insane. And for an autistic child, the act of placing one’s hand on a hot stove, without the reflex to withdraw it, can make one think that feeling can be interrupted.

Another individual, growing up, hands joined, gazing at the sky: one would think he had come straight from a painting evoking some mystic from the days of old.

There are strange coincidences here, consistent enough for the insoluble problem of form and content to be posed.

So here we have gestural forms that appear to have no content. Is this possible?

It seems more reasonable to think that, for the same form, there can be several contents.

We know of the rocking that often occurs in mute children, while in certain religions, perhaps most, prayer must be accompanied by rocking; mere language is in some way
surpassed. Whereas for the children affected with what is often viewed as a symptom, it is a question of a vacancy of language. The same attitude corresponds to the same content, the same vacancy, the same lacuna, suffered by some and sought after by others.”
― Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts

“To put it another way, this completely minuscule part of the terrestrial globe where autistic children walk and run and whose pathways, wander lines, are traced does not claim to seed the entire surface of the globe, is not at all inclined toward a globality in which an endemic ideological absolute would be found.

Cards and maps don’t actually tell us much, except that we have no idea what the human is, or for that matter the common.

Hence the fact that being a communist is indeed one of the most difficult things to be in a universe where humans strive desperately and stubbornly, as they must, to formulate their rights, whereas common humanity, a humanity of the species, not being of the nature according to which language has provided us, forever, with rights, will never have any: they are unformulable.”
― Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts

“The network is not about doing or making; it is devoid of anything that would serve the purpose, and any excess of purpose leaves it in tatters at the very moment when the excess of the project is deposited in it.”
― Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts

“...for wander is a verb that needs no object…My aim is to limit myself to the ingenuity of innate action, to be awed by it, and not to try and clear up its mysteries.”
― Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts