Art and madness as the threshold for another history

Abstract

We intend to problematize art and madness. We begin by discussing the experience of the researcher in relation to images of the world, to witnessing and to the image of the insane, and then inevitably to the outside they evoke. Subsequently, we stand before a wall, a limit situation in which madness as catastrophe and art as poetics compose a threshold, an absence which Blanchot transposes to language to bring other possible constellations into view, both as words and as their unnamable others. Finally, with Walter Benjamin, we touch upon the grain of the history of madness - immersed in the Writing Workshop at the São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, we reveal that, in relation to madness, art can become the essential language of the perilous passage towards experience, transposing the experience of this horrific state to bring another sense to the world, recognizing other modes of existence which may come to be other poetics of life.

Keywords:
art; madness; threshold; history; language