ABSTRACT
Sauvages had sketched the fundamental role of passion, citing it as a more constant, more persistent, and somehow more deserved cause of madness: “The distraction of our mind is the result of our blind surrender to our desires, our incapacity to control or to moderate our passions. Whence these amorous frenzies, these antipathies, these depraved tastes, this melancholy which is caused by grief, these transports wrought in us by denial, these excesses in eating, in drinking, these indispositions, these corporeal vices which cause madness, the worst of all maladies.”1 But as yet, what was involved was only passion’s moral precedence, its responsibility, in a vague way; the real target of this denunciation was the radical relation of the phenomena of madness to the very possibility of passion.
