Reflections on language, madness, and literature: Michel Foucault and the madness’ literature

Abstract

The Classic Age was characterized by the reclusion of lunatics and other marginalized people (vagabonds, the poor, homosexuals...), and as a result of this, by the exclusion of madness from the world of literature. At the beginning of the Modern Age, when madness was considered a mental disease and had become an institution specifically for the reclusion of lunatics (the psychiatric hospital), also appears the lunatic’s literature. Thus returns the ancient relationship between madness and literature that had been experienced between the Middle Ages and the Baroque, a return that takes place at a time when the very social experience with the word already had changed. The aim of this paper is to reflect, together with Foucault, upon the relationships between madness and literature, drawing on the strategic mechanisms of language as a social experience. Keywords: Language. Madness. Literature. Michel Foucault.