Important quotations
At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.
By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voice the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed.
The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.
And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning flash of works such as those of Hoederlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud…
