Autism: From Experience To Community Discourse, And Back

This essay advances some reflections developed in response to Sofie Boldsen’s contribution to this volume, with the aim of situating the theses it advances within a broader epistemological framework grounded in a semiotic approach. Boldsen’s essay underscores the methodological and theoretical role of first-person testimonies as indispensable sources for describing and understanding the specificities of autistic experience. What is even more interesting is that these testimonies not only enrich phenomenological inquiry but also challenge some of its core categories. In particular, attention is given to the crisis of the transparency of interbodily attunement, conceived by phenomenology as a given structuring our natural way of engaging in the social realm, which is nonetheless confuted by the autistic condition. Starting from this observation, the present contribution proposes some reflections on the role of the discourse of the autistic community in understanding the forms of autistic experience, and its relevance for their legitimation within cultural and academic domains. The goal is, then, to highlight the link between phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches from an explanatory point of view—which a semiotic perspective could unite within a structured framework.