Unconjugating Community with Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy

This article takes as its point of departure unexpected similarities in the ways that the experimental educator, writer and filmmaker, Fernand Deligny, and Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualize community. Deligny is remembered for his alternative community for non-speaking children with autism, established in the Cévennes in 1967 and founded on the absence of language and relationality as it is commonly understood. This article probes the paradox that in this community we find a rapprochement with Nancy’s relational ontology. Drawing on Deligny’s theoretical responses to the dynamics he witnessed and the cartographical methods employed to trace the movements of the children as they roamed, andplacing these in dialogue with Nancy’s texts on community through the decades, I suggest a kinship between the two thinkers which opens onto broader questions about the relationship between theories and practices of community.