ABSTRACT
In many ways this is an unruly chapter and rightly so: its inhabitants defy order. Its subterranean theme is madness, but beyond the scatological fixations of de Sade and Bataille. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz (1961) employed as his mantra the phrase ‘madness is a sane response to an insane society’, but this was in the arch-liberal days of anti-psychiatry when R.D. Laing enjoyed cult status and before we realised that mental illness was, in many life-ruining manifestations, an issue of chemistry rather than bad mothering. Madness has, nevertheless, been both a topic and a resource for much contemporary critical thought with notions of disrupted categories, decentred selves, moral and political incorrectness, behaviour out of place, pain and abjection, and a scrambling of conventional grammars proving forceful devices in philosophy, art and the avante-garde.
