Between Displacement and the Immutable: Tracing in Fernand Deligny's (1913-1996) Cahiers de l'Immuable (1975-1976)

In his three Cahiers de l’Immuable, published between 1975 and 1976, Fernand Deligny reflects on the cartographic practice that emerged within his network for autistic youth in the French Cévennes. In this remote region, from around 1969 to 1979, his collaborators consistently traced the movements and objects on the network’s domains. Deligny’s notion of tracing thus referred to this cartographic activity carried out by the ‘close presences,’ but it also alluded to the youth, whose movements, according to the pedagogue, embodied a form of tracing. Both were actively tracing something. When read as an attempt to delineate the object of these forms of tracing, this object shifts across Deligny’s Cahiers de l’Immuable, indicating an evolved understanding of his care project and a renewed anthropology of the youth between the first and last cahier. This shift is examined in this article through the formal developments in the cartography and the changing emphasis in Deligny’s conceptual framework — transitioning from repère and the common body to chevêtre and the Immutable. Through this analysis, this article argues that the focus of Deligny’s care project and anthropology moved from an emphasis on displacement to a quest for the originary.