Madness

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani first approaches madness through a triangle taken from Merleau-Ponty: the self, the true and others. Madness is the combination from which the self is absent. With Nerval, Pascal, Baudelaire and King Lear, he suggests that the madman may carry reason when the collective loses it1. He then deals with it mainly through Nerval. He describes Nerval's madness as a psychosis, but he sets aside the pathological reading: the preface to Dumas shows a lucid writer, analysis must take precedence over interpretation, and the Nerval case amplifies structures common to everyone2. He contrasts the quest for the mother, which ends in disappointment and leads to madness, with the path towards Rousseau's tomb, which turns towards collective emancipation3. He makes the vertical dimension, that of the drowning and of Les Chimères, an instance of madness that Nerval is right to set aside4. Finally, with Nietzsche, Nerval and Hölderlin, "three madmen", he links madness to night, to intoxication and to the flight from a truth whose knowledge remains irreversible5.

1. 1Keller (Helen)15 Feb 2016
2. 2#4.2 Angélique (de Nerval)12 Nov 2017
3. 3Griaule (Marcel)18 Oct 2017
4. 4#4.5 Angélique (de Nerval)12 Feb 2018
5. 5#5 • Les Attelé(e)s de la confinitude18 Apr 2020

Introduction produced automatically from the 7 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.