The Mimesis of Madness and the Semiotics of the Text

Author(s): Wladimir Krysinski and Raili Mikkanen

Source: SubStance , 1979, Vol. 8, No. 1, Issue 22 (1979), pp. 1-15
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3684139

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The Mimesis of Madness and the Semiotics of the Text

Wladimir Krysinski

"Madness would thus be a word perpetually inappropriate to

itself and interrogative through and through, such that it would
call into question its own possibility and hence the very possibility
of the language and would convey it, and thus challenge
interrogation as well to the extent that the latter belongs to the
play of language."
M. Blanchot

1. Lodged within the trenchant dichotomy: reason vs unreason, madne

manifests itself only when language, perception overdetermined by diverse
interpretive schemas, and the reading of ideologically enslaved signs take ho
of it. If madness appears in the theatre of the critical and analytical word, it
due to its appropriation by the mythology of the permanence of theses an
anti-theses.
Being primarily the social adventure of subjectivity, madness enters into a
multiple discourse. From Plato's psychology to schizo-analysis, discourse
constantly displaces it from the periphery to the center and from the center to
the periphery. Condemnation, glorification, apotheosis, negation, normaliza-
tion-madness resides as much in a diversity of viewpoints as in the clinical
apprehension of its somatic and psychic manifestations. The diverse semiotic
orders arrogating madness at times nourish themselves with its signs and symp-
toms, at others impugn it in the name of a critical discourse on the mental and
social structures which produce it.
The discourse productive of madness is inevitably a servile and pragmatic
discourse, whatever its meta-linguistic anchorage. The discourse apprenticed
to madness is one of ready contempt, of a wager placed on the refusal of the
fiction of fixed anti-theses, hence a para-dialectical discourse. Understood as a
phenomenon of unreason, madness inevitably refers to the play of oppositions
which put reasoning reason, intelligence, on stage, such as it is, unchanged by
its intellect. Thus, as a prisoner of reason, as a lugubrious epiphenomenon of
reason, madness is not spared the idiosyncracies of anti-madness. Situated
between madness and anti-madness, the signs are gaping and futile, as long as
they undergo the interpretive gesture inscribed within the circuit of the theses
and anti-theses of the dominant ideology.

Sub-Stance No 22, 1979 1

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2 Wladimir Krysinski

2. If literature, among other things, mim

conserving the ambiguous status of madness.
and the other than official comprehension o
modalities, the limits and the finalities of the
the text. The interpretation of a text, ostens
valorisation of the referential chains generate
of the text. These referential chains can attest to the success as well as to the
failings of the mimesis of madness. They can also be differently oriented,
beyond a strict recognition of a mimetic drive; they can rely on the exceeding of
madness as a necessary pole of interpretation; the role of the interpretive
strategy of a text produced as a demonstration of madness, or else as the
unrestrained writing of a supposedly mad subject, can become a bracketing of
madness in the name of a discourse intending to be more discursive than
mimetic of a presupposed mimesis, more totalizing than clinical, more
constraining than constrained.
Positing the meaning of madness in the text and interpreting this very
meaning reflect the paradoxes of a mimetic activity which adopts madness as an
object of reflection. To mime, to reproduce, to represent madness in the text
presupposes a polyvalence of the semiotic gesture constructive of meaning, to
the extent that playing upon the structure of the "difference of the Other in the
exteriority of others," according to Foucault's formulation,1 the semiotic
gesture must reconstitute, mime and manifest, if not understand the difference.
The operation mimetic of madness is based upon an initial breach between the
immediacy and irreducibility of a poly-referential structure retrieved and
inevitably exceeded by language. The narrative of madness seeking to be other
capitulates to a pre-established rationality which transforms it into a rhetoric
and a textuality, gives it a frame of reference pointed to by the others.
The operation of literarity is a castrating operation for madness. Madness
in the text is no longer what it was in the pre-text, in the so-called reality which
structures the diversity of the Spaltungen. This is obvious, just as is the fact that
the play of mimesis faced with the truth is but a fabrication of signs which split
the phenomenon into difference and diffirance; hence it remains to be shown
how the fact of reading madness in the text constitutes an operation necessarily
reductive of the differenciation and the dispersion of the phenomenon, but
also an operation of successive embeddings of structures and of introducing
the phenomenon within another system or systems of signs.

3. The inscription of madness in the text opens onto the field of meta-textual
isotopies, which may vary in number but which provide but one image, one
representation projected beyond the theatre of the body and of the instincts,
outer and inner theatre of madness. The meta-textual isotopies of madness are
overdetermined by madness itself as a complex isotopy that disseminates the
text and as an instigator of the operators of interpretation of the text such as the
psychoanalytical scenario, identification of madness in its clinical agencies
(instances): psychosis, paranoia, neurosis, schizophrenia, delirium and hallucina-
tion. On the other hand, madness is an isotopy as theme, topos, image, and textual

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 The Mimesis of Madness 3

scenario which provoke a multiplication o

system or systems of significance, that is
identification of the signifying entity within a
interest is the access of the signifying entit
language constituting the text. This incursi
system of language constitutes a displacement,
to the extent that madness passes over from
significance to the system of verbal sign
semiotically to the extent that the interfere
two systems: psychoanalytical and linguistic,
relationships: generation, homology and int
To recognize the relationship of generation
of the analytical reasons for madness, and la
recognize the primacy of the instincts, of d
the text. It is to recognize the post-primacy
necessary generation of a conflictual situ
trated by psychoanalytical reason.
The play of generation nevertheless invok
which confront the metalanguage of psychoa
even prior to a scrutiny of its incidences
already inscribed, as this complex isotopy m
circle, a circular tautological space where
actants, and language appropriates and distr
Benveniste observes that the relationship o
of the connections discovered or established
nature of the homology may vary, "intuitiv
tural, conceptual or poetic."'4 Among other
one invoked by Panovsky between Gothic ar
The relationship of interpretance is "betwe
interpreted system." This relationship priv
language is "the interpretant of all semiotic
"semiotic modelling" to the extent that it "conf
signifying systems by informing them with
To recognize the signifying capacity of madn
signs wherein generation, homology and int
occurrences; by virtue of the representa
occurrences reflect the psychoanalytical verd
modelling structure which is language" (Ben

4. The principle of recognition of the sig

presence in the two semiotic systems does no
the relationships to be established between
another text animated by the same mimetic i
meaning and signification of madness in the
function and significance of madness in the

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4 Wladimir Krysinski

The structure of the language which ap

incontestably refers to a topic (topique) which
analysis, philosophy and language as such,
intertextuality. Let the series read: Didero
Pirandello, Trakl, Witkiewicz, Artaud. G
defining the syntactic, semantic and pragm
termed the levels of fragmentation or the reg
would signify the placing of a meta-lingui
homology, generation and interpretance ope
But the mimesis of madness is also the semiotization of madness in the inter-
textual sphere.

5. An analytical glance at the series of writers above reveals the play of inco
testable textual redundancies. The function of madness for each of these
authors is defined far more by a desire to signify than by a mimetic desire
desire to signify is a desire to say in the place of something else, to prod
structures of signs as procuration, delegation and replacement. Thus mad
symbolizes, it speaks of something other than itself. Language interp
madness by submitting it to structural homologies which show to what ex
what is taken to be madness--that palinode of wounded subjectivity,
convulsion of being, or rather of what Lacan calls "dis-being," that explo
obsession--employs language as its approximate mold. The mimesis
madness occurs in the epistemic agencies which represent an approximati
and aptly structural idea of the alethetical agencies in which madness occu
event, as presence, as Gegenwart. The presentification of madness, Verge
wiirtigung, discloses a textual strategy which must rely on a benevo
rationality in order to pass over into the domain of perception. This text
strategy of madness acts as a vestige, as a recovery of the loss of the event and
an exchange which simultaneously establishes an intertextual dialectic an
meta-topic of the text taking upon itself the disharmony of the topic, t
scandalous rupture of the being.
6. The textual agencies of redundance posit the semic terms of the languag
madness which enter into the mimetic strategy. These semic terms ca
defined as: the privileged discursive situation of the meta-logocentric subj
madness as meta-logos, the solidarity of delirium and truth according to
Platonic articulation of the conjunctive opposition "manikf//mantikh,"6
disarticulation of the text which could be defined as a "strategy of fract
assured by the meta-logocentric subject in an exceptional discursive situati
These semic characteristics permit us to posit the terms of a triple homol
psychic//philosophical//verbal.
Hegel's interpretation of Le Neveu de Rameau convincingly establishes
terms of this homology. Hegel makes use of Diderot's text to extract a spe
enunciative situation and to inscribe this into his own topic of the languag
the spirit in its impetus towards Reason. The situation of communication
forth by Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau puts into play an "I" and a "he",
narrative dialogizing "I" of DIiderot and the "he" of the Nephew. H

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 The Mimesis of Madness 5

interprets this situation as the occurrence of a

of the spirit opposing two types of conscio
abject consciousness, the latter being also a
mutiges Bewusstsein, Zerrissenes Bewusstsein
consciousness is "consciousness of perversion"
rung); it is dominated by the concept (der Beg
the language of the concept is "scintillating w
speaks of itself through the concept. And
defines it as follows:

The contents of the spirit's discourse in and on itself is therefore the perver-
sion of all concepts and of all realities; it is the universal deception of itself and of
others, and the impudence of uttering this deception is precisely for that reason
truth of the highest order. This discourse is the extravagance of the musician who
"amasses together and jumbles up thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of
every imaginable species".7

It is evident that the quotation from Diderot beginning with the verb
"amasses" enables Hegel to define a topical situation of discourse correspond-
ing to a strategic situation of the ego, reflecting face to face with noble
consciousness. As we have seen, Hegel associates with this strategy the tactic of
the impudence of uttering one's own deception ("die Schamlosigkeit, diesen
Betrug zu sagen") as well as the tactic of the "perversion of all concepts and of
all realities." This discourse is extravagant, but it is also a "potpourri of wisdom
and folly" (ein Faselei von Weisheit und Tollheit). Thus this distinctive
situation of enunciation constitutes for Hegel a manifestation of the spirit
restored unto itself. The recourse to madness, to totalizing disorder, to a
strategy of mixture becomes the guarantee of truth and of the progress of
consciousness.
The triple homology: philosophical//psychic//verbal comes about, we
say, as an operation of the discourse of delirium, but also as the emerge
truth and as a topicalization of language. 'The functionality of this hom
must be situated on the level of the semiotic isotopy which we shall ca
Hegel's terms, the "language of dismemberment" (die Sprache der Zerr
heit).

7. The language of dismemberment is also a dismemberment of language, Die

Zerrissenheit der Sprache; this would seem to be one of the significant
functions of mimetic narration which madness, lodged in the paradigmatic
order of the clinical, philosophical and semiotic discourse, fulfills. Understood
as an isotopy of the positing of meaning, the language of dismemberment can
be defined as the mimetic drive of madness aiming at the very inadequacy of
pre-existing language and of the vertical fall, of the collapse of subjectivity
wishing to grasp itself in the uniquity of its agencies. Thus the language of
dismemberment simultaneously refers to its semiotic function and to its
semantic or symbolic function. The former effects a staging of the subject; it
indicates and situates the subject on the level of its verbal assault against
rationality, normativity and the language of good breeding and behavior. The

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6 Wladimir Krysinski

latter reflects the state of submission impo

narrativity of the subjectivity; it exposes the m
psychotic adventure. This meaning, read with
textuality constructed by the discourse of
deciphered hence not only as a record of a u
medical or psychoanalytical language, but also
textual interrelations and for a mitigation of t

8. "H61derlin was mad, but was he?" asks M. Bla

a constant dispersion of the referents of madn
an analysis of its mythic, semiotic and differ
Holderlin's madness signifies an obliteration of
The latter is not only the scenario composed o
poet as recorded by external spectators. It mim
discourse by the activation of a desire repre
endures as a vivisection of the rational, the vis
and repetition. The facts as they occur in the
"appalling," the chronology reveals a progress
internment in the Tfibingen clinic is necessary
stupor. Great anguish. H61derlin in the strait
with the carpenter Zimmer at Tiibingen. H61d
overlooking the Neckar for thirty-six year
dementia praecox is reached (schizophrenic sta
the demented poet."8
Can this strict statement of the facts give a
totality which underlies and animates H61older
projected into language, speaks other, differe
play which the intertext writes beneath and b
arises: what aspect of insanity is mimed? Does
mimesis of madness? "Certainly, says Adorno, t
to art is by its very substance a universal, imp
through the indissoluble idiosyncrasy of a par
that every idiosyncrasy is nourished by "unco
subject is elevated to the rank of a "petrified te
geronnen). 10
H61lderlin's madness simultaneously shatt
utterance. As soon as speech is broken off the
other than those of the poem's course as fixed
Holderlin's subjective idiosyncrasy and the con
technology." But it is this course which intere
beyond the stage of mono-communication from
semiotized structure in opposition to other te
referents which organize the discursive, form
poetry. With Ho1derlin the language of dismem
of a break with the pre-text which lends i
underlies poetic inspiration understood as a

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 The Mimesis of Madness 7

Madness no longer represents the only r

underly a semiosis oriented according to
Madness is a result of the explosion o
acceptable and tamed in the house of t
register, madness is a term outstripped
H61derlin is a subject of the speech act
conflict and dismemberment, but which
the collapse of the immediate referents w
wished to nourish itself. The process of si
thematic constraints of an idealization o
dialogue with the gods, opens out toward
and the signified and toward the emptiness
an individuality keyed to harmony and p
puts an end to the harmonious utter
thematic reduction of the poetic word, s
overreaching of the impossibility of
utterance a being-there of the signifier wh
the speech act to the extent that this
dispersion and opacity of the referents.

9. Three successive versions of Mnemo

multiple fractures which the subject who
stage of the human and poetic memory in i
Desire is an instinct inseparable from the
conceives of precisely as the impossibility
functions as a catalyst and as a rupture
desire speaks as a de-constructed logos; i
parataxis which Th. Adorno defines as th
of the H1lderlinian discourse. 11 The three
the process of signification dependent
nullification of man's desire for the d
formulations:

Viel Manner m6chten da//Seyn, wahrer Sache, Nicht vermogen//Die Himmlischen

alles. (first version)
Many men would desir
capable of all.

Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos//Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast//Die
Sprache in der Fremde verloren. (second version)
We are a meaningless sign, painless are we and in estrangement we h
lost speech.

Even if these two passages are absent from the definitive version, the
the poem which is attached to the two preceding passages is retai
out all three versions. It is placed in a signifying relationship
connective symbol of a "wanderer in frenzy." "Ein Wander
zornig//Fern ahnend mit//Dem andern, aber was ist diss?" "A Wa

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8 Wladimir Krysinski

frenzy, penetrating in the distance with the

H61derlin closes the poem by a sequence o
beings" wishing to be whole:
Am Feigenbaum ist mein//Achilles mir gestorb
Grotten der See...

There, under the fig tree, my Achilles died, And Ajax rests by the grottos
sea...

Mnemosyne enters the poem as a being d

poet her adventure signifies a rupt
Mnemosyne, dishevelled by the dusk"
communication between humans and the divine.

Himmlische nemlich sind//Unwillig, wenn einer nicht die Seele schonen

sich//Zusammengenommen, aber er musst doch; dem//Gleich fehlet die Traue
For the celestial ones are angered when, at the peril of his soul a being seeks
wholeness, yet he must; so doing relinquishes all mourning.

When examined from the perspective of the interpretive axis: lexis//m

sis//semiosis, this text raises the problem of the possible meaning o
signifying structure. What is mimed? What is semiotized by this utteranc
the lexis? Let us suppose for a moment that the madness of the poet is
principal mimetic support of this text. Recognized as such it defines itsel
discourse on a discourse, for the narrativization of the subject is inevita
projected beyond the subject. The actants of the text reflect the subject
they also reflect themselves. The subject speaks as accusation and as dem
stration of a discursive structure wherein he can no longer survive as a u
Madness unhinges the resistence of a constraining referent; but at the s
time it projects the referent into the context of a semiosis which transfor
into something other than the instinctual psalmody of the subject. I
unfinished creative projects Holderlin notes

Die Aprioritit des Individuellen//iiber das Ganze.

The apriority of the individual over the whole.

The apriority of the individual over the whole posited as postulate o

identified desire, is unrealizable. It is rather the apriority of the whole w
defines the poetic activity cut off from the context of desire and from
desiring instinct. Poetry speaks before it is spoken by the subject. The alle
of memory is a discursive avowal of the death instinct. The death ins
provides the scenario for the poet grappling with monomania, with the r
desire that devastates him. It is the immortality of the gods that generate
death instinct in humans. H61derlin retraces its narrative course to con
one stage of one of the activities of this instinct which is poetry. Beda Al
aptly notes:
The Empedoclean aspiration is now distinctly recognized, in its inhumanity, as
the death wish...

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 The Mimesis of Madness 9

Not only the Empedoclean nostalgia, but a

ture of the gods and heroes leads to the wo
form of an excessive tenderness, is henc
Mnemosyne). Already at the time of Hyperion
of a nostalgia for a Whole and an elegiac r

Mnemosyne represents a narrativity othe

affliction, as Geisteskrankheit, of the com
tion or the multiple structures of an
Mnemosyne poses the problem of the lim
thus of difference. This text opens out o
the closing up of poetry as understood a
same time H61derlin's text opens up the
must pose the interpretive terms beyon
textuality capable of pointing out a meaning
mind which, so it seems, allows only
disintegration and retreat,"'4 as form
madness which also encompasses his pseu
play of a double, Scardanelli, signing his
hinigkeit) and marking dates which defy
functions as a connector for the para-sub
textuality extending beyond H61derli
Artaud and Celan.

10. What B. Alleman calls "elegiac resignation" can be taken as the textu
of a structure of relays between the exhaustion and the summit of the l
of dismemberment, and the position of the subject of the poetic utter
defined as consciousness and as stake of unreason. Thus within the inter-
textuality of poetic modernity, H61derlin opens the paradigm of "the
while firmly closing that of a harmonious vision of the relationships b
men and gods. The equation: life = death and its inversion: death =
H61derlin, notably in the poem In lieblicher Bliiue which ends on the st
"Leben ist Tod, und Tod ist auch ein Leben," casts a particular light on
language and on language period. Language is no longer instrument
understanding between conversationalists sharing the same code of pl
It is death's parentheses and sign of its own autonomy.
So madness will appear in language as a narrative sign, as a para-su
referent which plays its role in the ars combinatoria of poetry. Rimba
other," "the derangement of all the senses," constitute a ruptur
H61derlin's "elegiac resignation," but at the same time retain madn
semiotic strategy of a discourse fixed on the "unknown."
The poet becomes a seer by means of a long, vast and intentional derange
of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, madness; he seeks himself,
exhausts within himself all poisons to retain only the quintessences. An in
cribable torture where he needs all faith, all superhuman power, whe
becomes among all else the great afflicted one, the great criminal, the gr
accursed,-and the great Knower!-For he reaches the unknown! 15

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10 Wladimir Krysinski

The triple homology we have posited regar

memberment: philosophical/psychic/verbal,
Presently, and since Rimbaud, it reads as psychic
stated that madness functions therein as narrative
a condition for cognition, as a connector in a cogn
mimesis of madness is no longer a value in itself, but
cognitive posited as the result of dementia. Henc
articulate in the form of an interpretive antinomy
vantage point of the text or else the text viewed
presents a strategical choice for the interpretant
does not impose a restriction on the choice. F
Artaud and Celan, madness inscribes itself in the
text as a factor in what Adorno calls the "desensitizat
"the totality devoid of rules."16 Madness, as yet l
psychoanalytical setting, is ousted by the text whi
necessary but not fundamental dialectical suppor
language its grammaticality and its forms of acc
turn absorbs from madness its dimension of
projecting this into the ineffable.

11. What does Artaud record in Le Pise-Nerfs? And

the progress of madness, this madness is as yet
reason, ever exteriorizing itself before the impe
"terrifying advancing forms." In Artaud the nar
reason, normality and humanity provokes a seco
rupture of subjective syntax operates at the cost
anaphora of the "I." Artaud's discourse is solidly
functionality of deictics.
Madness is an agression of the unconscious and
by the systematic notation of an excursion beyo
madness, mimetically manifest through the impu
partakes in the narration of a spectacular spir
stalked to the limits of its resistance and its "abs
One speaks to me of words, but it is not a matter of
of the spirit.
This crust of words that collapses--do not imagine that the soul escapes
unscathed. Life is contiguous with spirit; the spirit spins within the circle of the
human being, bound to the human by a multitude of threads...
(Fragments d'un journal d'Enfer)

Artaud's discourse strikes up a narrative ambivalence regarding the death

instinct and the life instinct. Language inserts itself into the narrativity secreted
by the growing decomposition of the ego as opposing the quest for an apt
narration of a cognition exceeding the bounds of the normal and the
catalogued.

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 The Mimesis of Madness 11

I lack the correspondence of words with the

(Le Pese-Nerfs

I am empty through the stupefaction of my

(Le Pise-Nerfs)

The course of madness, as it transforms

trophic, panicked and insufficient discurs
between spirit and language. As the condit
spirit is ever present as silent spectator of
auto-mythified voice; this spirit seekin
language, flounders in the "curdling of t
composite: subject and object, sender and
splits apart the temporality of a daily ag
conceptual knowledge far removed fr
speaking in Artaud's text notes its intensities
progress towards a cognition.
I want to express the distorted fixation, the
I observe myself in its minutiae.
I put my finger precisely on the flaw, the u
I lose myself in my thinking.
I am the one who knows the innermost recesses of loss.
(Le Pese-Nerfs)

In this account of the instantaneous, of the identifiable sought for within

ipseity, the play of the discourse aims at the pure conceptuality of the spirit; this
conceptuality would be the scaffold for visceral reactions and would sustain th
body in its instinctual fight against death. But the split in Artaud's frenzie
narration severs the visible from the conceptual; the rupture between t
image and the poetic utterance grounded in the knowing spirit veils the poet
discursivity in a myth; it is the myth of the word in progress, continually findin
new points of support, new props. The story of Abelard, his castration
symbolizes somatic loss and recognition of madness as well as the dissociatio
from spirit.
Oh, how I feel myself to be nothing more than viscera, lacking the bridge of the
spirit above me!
Universal madness is overcoming me. I am heightening my pleasure to the
loftiest summit of the ether.

In recording the temporality of frenzy, Artaud's discourse reaches the limit,

the ambiguous domain of word and image. And so the poetic utterance receives
the imprint of non-finality.
What pertains to the domain of the image is irreducible by reason and must
remain within the image to avoid its annihilation.
Nevertheless, reason is present within the image; there are clearer images in the
world of imaged vitality.
(Manifeste en langage clair)

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12 Wladimir Krysinski

To each the rationality of his own disorder! To

his dementia and the delirium rooted in the flesh
are the recurrences of the essential intensity. He
secular rationality, englobing theories and cat
Artaud must be peculiar to time, to the idiosyncr
I am thinking about life. All the systems I could erect w
man preoccupied in remaking his life.
I imagine a system wherein the entire man would p
physical flesh and the heights, the intellectual projec
(Position de la chair

The quest for reason is punctuated by the r

appropriation of the somatic, the visceral and the
flesh and is narrated by the fugacious center of t
lived body is at the same moment the repudiatio
grounded in concepts:
I destroy because, within myself, whatever originat
together. I believe only in the evidence of that which s
that which addresses my reason.
I am not renouncing anything of the Spirit. I only w
with its laws and its organs, elsewhere... I deliver m
dreams, but this in order to summon up new laws. I
cation, the finesse and acuteness, the intellectual ey
hazardous vaticination.
(Manifeste en langage clair)

To recount madness, the point of reason dispossessed, of reason ne

extinction, to enter into delirium itself, to arrest, to fix the flux of the bo
Artaud incessantly repeats the gesture of wishing to express his system of fault
from out of a contradictory center: logocentric and decentered reason, inst
ment of measure and of expression. Language carries him farther and fart
away from the mimetizing word. It is the a-referential word which overha
him. Artaud posits the Madman as the symbolic condition for his anguish
narrativity. Thus the Madman is an a-narrative actant in this system whi
never succeeds in constructing itself. The Madman understands. The Madm
is the culmination of the supreme dialectic of reason silently communicat
the truth.

The truth of life lies in the impulsivity of matter. In the midst of concepts
man's spirit is sickly. Do not ask it to become satisfied, ask it only to be calm, to
believe it has in effect found its place. But only the Madman is calm.
(Manifeste en langage clair)

In relating to his reluctant body the end of metaphysics, the end of the voic
of semiotic sympathy, in relating this by means of the defensive body, the acta
"madness" and that narrative and untellable totality, Artaud will have dissol
the pragmatic finality of madness. His account becomes the sign of the divis
which will posit the new conditions for the text, for the work.

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 The Mimesis of Madness 13

Madness is alienation as well as inalienation.

The work or its absence. These two determinations indefinitely confront o
another within the closed field of metaphysics in the same manner as those
termed by Artaud the "evident" or "authentic alienated" and the others confr
one another within history...
The concepts of madness, of alienation or of inalienation belong irreducib
to the history of metaphysics. More precisely: to that epoch of metaphysics
determining being as the life of a subjectivity proper.17

12. The referential marks of the text buttressed by the mimesis of ma

manifest a transmuted sense, a divided spectacle of the letter and the o
englobing at one and the same time the subject in a state of ascension in
mimetic gesture and its reduction to the role of one of the signs of the
What the subject shows of itself in the textual machine is a delineation o
subject in function of the values conveyed by the text. The axiology of th
even of the text which expresses madness as a re-production overdeterm
by the chaotic economy of psychotic, schizophrenic, delirious disorder, ef
transmutation of the perimeters of madness. If the mimesis of ma
imitates an excess of subjectivity which, according to Auguste Comte, s
define madness, this excess itself, textually codified, subverts the pletho
delirium, of the loss of the ego to the extent that once inscribed into the
this excess slips over to the side of an intersubjective symbolic narrativity
in the textual production of a delirious reproduction of an exc
subjectivity, this subjectivity is put to trial by the intersubjectivity of the se
instinct. The operators of madness catalyze the psychoanalytical or psych
interpretive schema; the clinical stance retreats in suspension over each
able to guarantee only a partial, if apt, sense for the delirium. Semiotics
on a surplus of mimetic values and on an overreaching of the clinical by
meta-text.

The function of madness in intertextuality, the salient featur

have tried to indicate, invokes the polysemy of its signifying status
polyreferential sign, fixing a series of horizons: instinctual, p
phrenic, phantasmic, psychoanalytical. It enters the game of sem
between the history of decentered subjectivity and the act of its m
the textuality of the text and the economic instinct of reproduction
between mimesis oriented toward specular language and the di
the signs of the text establishing its own narrativity. Madness is
semiotic mold wherein is formed the polymodal account o
cramped back into the ultimate situation of its chaos, of its som
miming madness, the narrativity of madness displaces th
symmetry of desire and of death, of loss and of gain, of overr
sinking back. As a semiotic isotopy of the circular of referent
inseparable from the discourse of the multiple to the detriment
of the unique. The text upheld by the mimesis of madness effects a
mimetic speculum of the specular.
From using the symbolism of language, madness has consum
the very paroxysm of the fiction of signs. The fiction of signs,

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14 Wladimir Krysinski

illusion of reproductivity have been beaten into r

The body signifies its truth short of languag
truth of the body into the narrativity of the tex
reproduction and becomes the in-itself of fict
madness, an image which language cannot
underfoot by madness. Madness unhinges
legitimacy of the text, the play of so-called
subjectivity-letter-psyche, etc. Madness disrup
language. It shows up the insufficiency of lan
menal adventure which language can only ren
system of exchange. The exchange value of t
madness.
The semiotic and semantic categories of madness (rupture of the being,
plaintive subjectivity, massacre of appearances, subversion of the norm, mono-
communication, paralogics of delirium), structured narratively in the text,
permit, in imitation of the relationships between paranoiac psychosis and
personality,18 an understanding of the relations of tension inside literature and
language playing out their progress, their totality and their divergence against
the backdrop of madness, the necessary dialectical support for the production
of the text by means of the difference.
Posited as a complex structure and as a condition for textual mimesis,
madness lays language bare and projects it into a "no man's land" of its
grammatical, phonetic and logocentric diction.19 The mimesis of madness
exchanges itself within an economy of loss and substitution. Madness, as
changed by the desire for textual mimesis, generates a semiosis of the text, a
stifling of the unrepeatability of the silence and of the cry of the body.

Translated by Raili Mikkanen

NOTES

1. Cf. M. Foucault, Histoire de lafolie a l'dge classique (Paris: Ed. Gallimard, 1972
2. Cf. E. Benveniste, Problimes de linguistique gindrale, II (Paris: Ed. Gallimard,
3. Cf. E. Benveniste, ibidem, p. 60.
4. Cf. ibidem, p. 61.
5. Cf. ibidem, pp. 61, 63.
6. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus; Socrates; "But this at least is worth pointing out, that the m
gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they
connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future,
manic art. The fact that they did so shows that they looked upon madness as a fine
comes upon man by divine dispensation, but their successors have bungled matters by
tion of a T and produced the word mantic. Similarly, augury and the other methods b
in their right minds inquire into the future, and through which they acquire insight
tion by the exercise of purely human thought.. ." (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 4
Hamilton.
7. Cf. Hegel, Phinominologie de l'esprit, t. II (Aubier, 1947), p. 80, tr. from the French by J
Hyppolite.

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 The Mimesis of Madness 15

8. Cf. "Quelques documents sur la folie de H61derlin,"

with Pierre Klossowski, Poemes de lafolie de Holderlin (Ed
pp. 124, 125. I quote the German text of H61derlin fr
Gedichte nach 1800.

9. Cf. Th. Adorno, Thdorie esthitique (Paris: Ed. Klincksieck, 1974), p. 62, tr. from the German by
Marc Jimenez.
10. Cf. Th. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie , Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 69:
"Gesellschaftliches Denken fiber Asthetik pflegt den Begriff der Produktivkraft zu vernachliissigen.
Die ist aber, tief in die technologischen Prozesse hinein, das Subjekt; zur Technologie ist er
geronnen. Produktionen, die es aussparen, gleichsam technisch sich verselbstandigen wollen,
miissen am Subjekt sich korrigieren."
11. Cf. Th. Adorno, "Parataxis, zur spiten Lyrik H61derlins" in Noten zur Literatur III (Bibliothek
Suhrkamp, 1971), pp. 156-209.
12. Cf. H61derlin, Simtliche Werke, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Friedrich Beissner, ed., vol. II
(Stuttgart, 1943-), p. 198, tr. from the German.
13. B. Allemann, "H61derlin et Heidegger," in Recherche de la relation entrepoesie etpensie (P.U.F.,
1959), pp. 84-85, tr. from the French by Fr. F6dier.
14. Cf. H. Stierlin, "Lyrical Creativity and Schizophrenic Psychosis as Reflected in Friedrich
H61derlin's Fate," in Friedrich H1olderlin, An Early Modern (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Press, 1972), p. 215.
15. Cf. A. Rimbaud, "Lettre ' Paul Demeny (Lettre du voyant)," in Oeuvres (Paris: Ed. Garnier,
1960), p. 346, tr. from the French.
16. Cf. Th. Adorno, Philosophie de la nouvelle musique (Paris: Ed. Gallimard, 1962), p. 127, tr. from
the German by Hans Hildenbrand and Alex Lindenberg.
17. Cf. J. Derrida, "La parole souffl6e," in L'criture et la diffirence (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1967), p.
290.
18. Cf. J. Lacan, De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnaliti, followed by Premiers

tcrits sur la paranoia (Ed. du Seuil, 1975).

19. The differential relationship: mimesis/semiosis in the case of madness is accompanied by
another relationship: madness, understood as discursive term, mimetic pole//limit of the sign. Cf.
concerning this the following observations of M. Pierssens: "All research into language
undoubtedly has madness as its counterpart: because language is the locus of meaning in its
sociability, and a disarticulation of language is a disarticulation of the institutional economy of
meaning in order to substitute in its place that which speaks, that is, the truth of desire." ... "To
touch the sign is, proportionally to the degree of its desire and the nuance of the nothingness which
it uncovers, to go towards madness, prophecy or literature," "La tour de Babil, sur quelques
aventures linguistiques," in Semiotexte, Saussure's Anagrams, vol. 2, no. 1, spring 1975, pp. 67 and 89.
Tr. from the French.

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