What does it mean to grow up alongside someone who is not on Earth, and who never will be? This question is the question of my own history, linked to the fact that I grew up with an Asperger’s autistic brother. We are almost twins by age, which means that I have never lived without this “extraterrestrial” presence. My relation to the world was constructed in this permanent to-and-fro between terrestrial life and these other places of life with which he communicates in his way, from microcosm to macrocosm. To enter into relation with my brother, I need to get away from the human and create a connection via other areas of life: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the cosmological.
In order to be able to grow up alongside my Asperger’s autistic brother, and simply to enter into relation with him, I had to open up my vision, at the risk of remaining a stranger to him. He has invited me to move away from myself, from the place where I was comfortably installed and made me switch into the unsayable realm of his invisible worlds.
We hear talk of a “coming humanity,” a humanity that is being transformed. In their extremely subtle relation to beings and things, might not an autistic person help us to make the transition between this now and “what is coming”? Like a kind of intermediary taking us towards other possibilities?