The philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy: a philosopher draws on his experience of madness. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis—and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of textbooks and academia, allowing philosophers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness—Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term—coexist, one mirroring the other. Kusters draws on his own experience of madness—two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart—as well as other first-person narratives of psychosis. Speculating about the maddening effect of certain words and thought, he argues, and demonstrates, that the steady flow of philosophical deliberation may sweep one into a full-blown acute psychotic episode. Indeed, a certain kind of philosophizing may result in confusion, paradoxes, unworldly insights, and circular frozenness reminiscent of madness. Psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality. Kusters evokes the mad person's philosophical or existential amazement at reality, thinking, time, and space, drawing on classic autobiographical accounts of psychoses by Antonin Artaud, Daniel Schreber, and others, as well as the work of phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists and such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He considers the philosophical mystic and the mystical philosopher, tracing the mad undercurrent in the Husserlian philosophy of time; visits the cloud castles of mystical madness, encountering LSD devotees, philosophers, theologians, and nihilists; and, falling to earth, finds anxiety, emptiness, delusions, and hallucinations. Madness and philosophy proceed and converge toward a single vanishing point.

An incredible publishing event: a philosopher draws on his own experience of madness as he takes readers on an unforgettble journey through the philosophy of psychosis and the psychosis of philosophy. In this book, philosopher and linguist Wouter Kusters examines the philosophy of psychosis--and the psychosis of philosophy. By analyzing the experience of psychosis in philosophical terms, Kusters not only emancipates the experience of the psychotic from medical classification, he also emancipates the philosopher from the narrowness of academia, allowing philosphers to engage in real-life praxis, philosophy in vivo. Philosophy and madness--Kusters's preferred, non-medicalized term--coexist, one mirroring the other. Drawing on his own experience of madness--two episodes of psychosis, twenty years apart--Kusters argues that psychosis presents itself to the psychotic as an inescapable truth and reality.

Available for the first time in English--an essay with important insights on the sources of totalitarianism, intolerance, and racism

Ferit Güven illuminates the historically constitutive roles of madness and death in philosophy by examining them in the light of contemporary discussions of the intersection of power and knowledge and ethical relations with the other. Historically, as Güven shows, philosophical treatments of madness and death have limited or subdued their disruptive quality. Madness and death are linked to the question of how to conceptualize the unthinkable, but Güven illustrates how this conceptualization results in a reduction to positivity of the very radical negativity these moments represent. Tracing this problematic through Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, and, finally, in the debate on madness between Foucault and Derrida, Güven gestures toward a nonreducible, disruptive form of negativity, articulated in Heidegger's critique of Hegel and Foucault's engagement with Derrida, that might allow for the preservation of real otherness and open the possibility of a true ethics of difference.

"A groundbreaking, deeply personal, magnum opus on madness and philosophy from a psychotic patient turned philosopher"--

The Poetics of Philosophy is my attempt to hear what academic philosophy attempts to silence, namely, how reason resonates with madness. It is thus a stinging of the great steed of academia in order to recover and re-experience what otherwise would be repressed by the exigencies of bureaucratic-commodity life in the late capitalist world. An analysis of Plato’s principal dialogues with a view towards developing the author’s conception of thinking, knowing, and loving, it incorporates the insights of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida. Provoking the world mind to reflect upon its phenomenological possibility for Being dispersed within its daily routines or business, the book argues for the metaphysicality of physical reality articulated through the narrative trope of fractal dialectical logic. The present volume’s more general implications extend the insights of the author’s previous work in the area of social science. I refer to the possibility for world communist revolution, which is predicated on communism’s thorough ridding itself of its naïve materialist perspective, the relics of a Newtonian Universe, and its embracing of a fractal-dialectical logic (or similar) that is better able to incorporate the yearning for immortality, desire to experience beauty, and the need to have a meaningful life that define human species life. To articulate such a framework is the aim of my general research.