This interdisciplinary project focuses on the work of Fernand Deligny (1913–1996), a visionary but marginalized figure associated with the alternative and anti-psychiatry movements that emerged in the decades following World War II, both in France and transnationally. Deligny developed innovative methods for living alongside autistic children and adolescents, and produced voluminous texts, drawings, and documentary film projects reflecting his approach to working with those who lived “outside of speech” (hors de parole). Combining literary, visual, and film analysis with perspectives from critical theory, the history of science and psychiatry, and disability studies, this project explores Deligny’s singularly non-pathologizing, anti-institutional approach to translating the experiential dimensions of what he called autism as a “mode of being.” I especially focus on Deligny’s attention to the political, ethical, and aesthetic challenges of “translating” what is outside of language into writing and verbal speech, as exemplified in his experiments with the use of mapping and cartographic tracing to create forms of collective articulation. Through close readings of texts, cartographic drawings, and films, the project examines how Deligny upended existing critical frameworks for understanding the link between human language and subjectivity. It also situates Deligny’s ideas within a longer history of what might be called the politics of neurological difference. The project thus brings a disability studies approach to bear on the topic of translation, focusing on the ethical and political hazards of attempts to render the experiences and desires of nonspeaking subjects into language.