Common body

Abstract

How can we produce a commonality with an-other who is so radically different? How not to impose oneself on the other, not to assimilate them, not to say it beforehand, not to incorporate their difference into a given identity in the name of adequacy, adjustment, the abstract norm? It is in the field of this series of questions that Fernand Deligny creates a crucial infinitive for his critique: semblabiliser – something like “to “similarise”, that is, to make the other similar by assimilating them and thus making them disappear. This is what different “corrective” or imposing” practices have constantly done: the white colonizer with the Indigenous person, Itard with the wild boy, the psychiatrist with the deviant, the judge with the criminal. Although there are differences in these practices, Deligny recognizes that they always work according to binary forms and decides to take sides with minorities, seeking to observe reality from the perspective of the savage, the madman, the delinquent. Unlike such practices of similarization, Deligny elaborates the idea of a common body, a living organism and an artificial installation, thanks to which different modes of being can coexist.