ABSTRACT
The law which governs delire is semiotic; it gives delire its distinctive structure (the dialectic of excess and lack) and produces a mirror-effect: the paranoiac's delirium is faithfully reflected in the delire of the interpreting analyst. Reading or hearing delire is no longer an attempt at interpretation, it is an involvement in the flow of words, where the willing audience swims with the current, and allows itself to be carried away by the metaphors. A tree has a binary structure and so has delire in so far as it conforms to linguistic law. In the structural version, metaphor is all important; it is absent from delire, but it is an essential aspect of the workings of language: interpretation, symbolism, representation, all has something to do with the metaphoric process. The delire of a West Indian patient expresses his relation to the white majority and his experience of the Algerian war.
