ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the literature of delire is part of a broader tradition: a philosophical tradition which attempts to articulate linguistics with psychoanalysis. Nonsense and delire are two different responses to the paradox: presented in literary texts or deciphered from symptoms, they are only mythical solutions, but after all one of the less trivial definitions of myth, found in Levi-Strauss's Anthropologie Structurale is that it is the imaginary solution of a real contradiction. A coherent delire, the delire of the structure, the independent logic of the signifier precedes the emergence of the subject. When the emptiness of delire, or logorrhea, becomes too obvious, only language can fill it: the subject avoids being possessed by language by reflecting on it, finding its laws, commenting on the words. The best image of lalangue is in the phrase 'the mother tongue', and illustrations of its workings can be found in the delire of mad linguists: Brisset, Raymond Roussel, Artaud, Louis Wolfson.
