Abstract

This paper aims to explore the cartographical method as a political option able to destroy the linguistic and semiotic empire of sense. Starting from the difference between map and tracing, Deleuze and Guattari understood the power of a rhizomatic expression, commonly represented by the obsessive and compulsive gesture of autistics, or their impossibility of speaking correctly. This phenomenon has been deeply analysed by Fernand Deligny through his experience in the Cévennes, where he inaugurated his personal anti-psychoanalytic and anti-linguistic method. During this collective living, the wanderings of the autistic children, called Lignes d’erre, were traced and gathered in a cartography in which action overtakes word and speech, and human gestures are reterritorialized. Characterized by movement without finality, life in Cévennes becomes a “life raft”, where the raft is no more the shipwreck of humanity, but the shelter for no- speakers. Therefore, a new spatial configuration is given, where the bonds between people and with objects exist exactly as the pieces of wood in the raft: namely slacken, rhizomatic.