The Body of the Autistic Individual

To own one’s own body, for a human subject, requires the “symbolic” dimension. If the flesh, as represented by science in anatomical, physiological, or biological terms, weighs on the subject, the alienation of the signifier, in establishing the possibility of a symbolic order, is what allows for the presentation, or presentification, of being in the (or a) world. In autism, the subject halts before symbolic alienation; a halting that compromises those objects that provide a bond, the bond with the Other—namely, voice and gaze. But, just like any child, the autistic individual will seek some way to render this universe more bearable, and to humanize it through an act of symbolization, a pulsation, and then an articulation, which will use various objects as a support—objects elected to that special place that articulates a being with its presence within the world. This strategy of the sign is not opposed to the passage via the signifier, a signifier that is always alien, articulated, joined to the being by an object which itself will create a bond, in a singular alienation. We thus confirm that the autistic individual can make himself a kind of a body, and can even make use of speech, so as to construct a bond—but in relation to a language which, for such individuals, will always be a foreign language.