On the notebook of Janmari and the afterlife of lines — of flight

Abstract

This article aims to investigate some of the theoretical and artistic proposals of Fernand Deligny, articulating This line of thought with that of Jacques Derrida. To that end, I intend to approach Janmari’s notebook, a child welcomed by the network created by Deligny in the Cévennes, who, despite being a dumb and autistic child, was considered a skillful handwriter by Deligny. Janmari’s scriptural gesture is approached based on the reading of his lines, proposed by Deligny himself. He sees a correspondence between these lines and the lines of the same kind produced by the chief of the Nambiquara Indians in his encounter with Levi-Strauss, according to his account in “Writing lesson”. In short, this article attempts to address the political and ontological consequences of taking the traces of gestures of Amerindian peoples and autistic children as triggers to another notion of writing.