DU FOLIE

Mobilizing one’s attention and beliefs, putting oneself in tension, giving one’s trust: in service of what? Pier Paolo Pasolini urged to “throw one’s body into the battle,” perhaps to end up disregarding everything and talking about MADNESS, in the masculine.

It is time to wake up, to break out of isolation, confinement, to feel. Going to the mountains, shouting from the top, chopping wood, warming oneself… Am I talking nonsense? Am I reading too much news? Am I cultivating the fear and anxiety generated by this toxic environment? Am I mad, or is someone trying to make me believe that I am?

 I feel this when I dive into Antonin Artaud’s work, especially when I hear him ranting in his radio creation “To Be Done with the Judgment of God.” One should, like him, return to the atomic body, as opposed to the anatomical body, stripped of its organs and automatons, returned to its freedom, to relearn how to “dance backwards” and make this backwards my new place.I also draw inspiration from Michel Foucault’s writings, particularly his History of Madness in the Classical Age, where he shows that psychiatry, as we know it, is a Western construction based on exclusion. We can always remind ourselves that something that is constructed can be deconstructed, whether it’s a healthcare system, a sensitive mental state, or the perspective we have of it. The madman has not always been the marginalized figure we lock away. So, what is the dialogue between normality and madness, between reason and unreason? Madness refers to a marginalized and anticonformist posture, an obsession, a passion, a whim, an excessive financial expenditure, or even a form of claimed idiocy.

Concretely, we will dance because our bodies are ready to erupt—solar bodies, non-binary, ternary, anthropophagous, anthropogenic. In fact, we will dance on the anthropo(s)cene. We will chant sounds and utter words, overturning the primacy of the understandable over the expressive: do we not refrain from expressing ourselves when we don’t feel understood? We will find strength and courage to be in the world as we are to ourselves: normally maladapted, and no less proud or alive.