A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking (The MIT Press)

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.