Schizo: The Liberatory Potential of Madness

Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The term madness continues to perplex, to puzzle and to provoke. As such, questions about madness circulate around the place of madness across historical, cultural, and social boundaries. Regardless of the place that madness assumes in our world, madness can be understood as having the potential to liberate individuals from a society of control. Because madness can be understood not merely as one end of the binary of reason and unreason but as a form of art that allows us to transcend reason, it provides us with the ultimate liberation: to accept, know and understand the possibilities of a multiplicity of meanings and senses beyond reason, beyond the commonsense. And with such liberation, we gain the power not only to change our own lives, but society as a whole.