This essay proposes a reflection on the processes of homogenization that biopower imposes on the many ways of inhabiting cities, with a resultant silencing of insurgent subjectivities. The article draws on poststructuralist readings about madness, which is understood as a radical experience of alterity, set against the crisis of the representative model of present politics. But contemporary cities are made up of many voices. And on this point, some alternatives can emerge. Seeking to listen to what all have to say is part of the duty of civilizing, and it can redefine and expand what we have come to understand as democracy in the current world. As such, creating spaces in the city’s meshes to allow for the circulation of difference represents a concrete possibility for repoliticization at a global scale of social practice, and it may echo in new forms of citizenship and the emergence of a world that is, at once, more plural and more welcoming of singularities.
Democracy; Cities; Mental Health; Psychiatric Reform; Citizenship