83

"Which concepts can help us grasp the autistic body’s otherness, and account for its constitution? How can we think of the genesis of a body without referring to the time of subject-conscience or to the future of a reason given as the basis of its identity? Victor, the wild child: Victor lives in time, just as we live in the present, the perpetual now of a non-event, lost in the silence of the future. Victor has no sort of knowledge of Self or Time; Victor stays on the outskirts, outside man, apart from a conscience where he has no purpose, in the nature of things and the weather there, the instrument of a nature for which he is the go-between. Barometer, thermometer: these are tools for measuring the outside, measures of a movement where an autonomous reflexivity starts, where a body expresses the weather outside, where sensations spread the sinews of experience."