Arachnean and Other Texts

The network as a mode of being

In 1968, Fernand Deligny established a "network" for informally taking care of children with autism that was more than a mere site of living; it was a milieu created out of a reflection on the mode of being autistic. What is a space perceived outside of language? What is the form of a movement without perspective or goal? How do we engage with a world that is not our own, a world turned upside down yet truly common, where acting cohabitates with our actions and the unknown with our forms of knowledge? Such is the mythical web of the "Arachnean," made of lines, holes, traces, enigmas, and questions without answers that demand to see that which cannot be seen. The Arachnean and Other Texts is a collection of Deligny's writings from the second half of the 1970s. Long before the digital age of social networks, meshworks, and digital webs, Deligny speaks to us in his own autobiographical and aphoristic manner. For him, life was always experienced in the form of "the network as a mode of being."g."

Fernand Deligny (1913–1996) was a filmmaker, writer, activist, and educator whose work drew interest from prominent thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel de Certeau.

Drew S. Burk is a cultural theorist, editor, and translator of contemporary French philosophy.

Catherine Porter is professor emerita of French at State University of New York, Cortland. She has translated dozens of books, including Philippe Descola's Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration.