“The Clinic of Silence” with Catherine Perret

Catherine Perret is a French scholar, philosopher, art critic, psychoanalyst, and author. Please join us for Catherine Perret’s lecture on Fernand Deligny, an educator and activist who invented a radically new approach to autism. 

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/92946036075
Meeting ID: 929 4603 6075

From the thirties to the sixties, Fernand Deligny became famous in France as a libertarian educator. Then, until the nineties, he exiled himself with some friends and a few autistic children to Southern France. There he developed memorization, recording, and archiving practices (writings, movies, maps) opening the possibilities for speaking and non-speaking individuals in the community. His anthropological experimentations, inspired by Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-Gourhan, focused on a new concept: the “common body,” that had, after reading Keith Basso and Tim Ingold, an astonishing political impact. Catherine Perret will analyze how this concept can be read in regard to the sociological concept of the “social body” and how its invention proceeds directly from Fernand Deligny’s “artistic” inventions.