1. I presented the following paper, under the title ‘Dans la bouche de la folie, de la raison ・ la ration’, at the ‘Encounter between Rationalities’ conference which took place in September 2002 in Benin. Paulin Hountondji had asked Franéise Davoine and myself to give expression to the voice of madness in its relation to our practice as psychoanalysts and our research in the human sciences. Here I have added some thoughts inspired by conversations with the various practitioners, philosophers, mathematicians (in particular those of African origin) which that wonderful conference gave us the opportunity to enjoy freely.

2. The weekly seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Since the late 1970s, under the generic title ‘Madness and the Social Link’, it has been setting our clinical practice alongside various cultural, medical, fictional and aesthetic approaches in the whole of the field defined by madness.

3. Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation, Karnac, 1970, p. 21. Chap. 2 ‘Medicine as a Model’, §9: ‘The patient talked freely, but his communications are disjointed sentences which would, anywhere but in analysis, be described as “incoherent”. Such a term is insufficiently illuminating to lead to psycho-analytical interpretation, but the “vertex” (the “point of view” provided by regarding an analysis as an ordinary conversation) gives me a descriptive term suitable for immediate purpose. As it is not suitable for continuing the psycho-analytical discussion, the term “incoherence” must be observed more critically.’

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, New York, Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 5 et seq.

5. Translator's note: An untranslatable pun depending on the existence of two main meanings for the French verb ‘causer’: ‘to cause’ and ‘to talk’. ‘Cause toujours!’ is a colloquial and ironical expression normally meaning something like ‘You don't say!’ Here it is pressed into service to indicate an emphasis on causality.

6. Here I need to substitute my own grammatical construction of certain sentences for the confusions put over by most interpretations of this magnificent, limpid text.

7. John C. Eccles, How the Self Controls the Brain, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, Springer Verlag, 1994.

8. The same paragraph: Plato, Phaedrus, 244e.

9. Henri Poincaré, Science et méthode, Paris, Editions Kimé, 1999, chap. 1 ‘Le choix des faits’ (first edition Flammarion, 1908). Chapter 1 repeats the preface to the American edition of La Valeur de la science: ‘The choice of facts’, translated and so published first in English by G. B. Halsted, New York, 1907.

10. H. S. Sullivan (1892-1949): his clinical and theoretical work, based on his practice with schizophrenia, prepared American psychiatry to receive Freud's books. With Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, he had a lasting influence on psychiatric and psychoanalytical research in the direction of a rigorous inclusion of psychotic transference The phrase ‘one-to-one laboratory’ or ‘twosome laboratory’ was suggested by him to characterize this type of research. See Helen Swick Perry, Psychiatrist of America, The Life of Henry Stack Sullivan, Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982.

11. We can refer here to certain books by the mathematician René Thom who sets out, from his viewpoint, the appearance of forms on the edge of catastrophes. René Thom, Stabilité structurelle et morphogenèse, Paris, Interéditions, 1977; and Paraboles et catastrophes, Entretiens sur les mathématiques, la science et la philosophie, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.

12. Wilfred R. Bion, Second Thoughts, London, Karnac Books, 1984, chap. 10, ‘Commentary’: ‘With my present experience I would lay more stress on the importance of doubting that a thinker is necessary because thoughts exist. For a proper understanding of the situation when attacks on linking are being delivered it is useful to postulate thoughts that have no thinker. I cannot here discuss the problems, but need to formulate them for further investigation, thus: Thoughts exist without a thinker,’ p. 165.

13. See for example Eric R. Kandel, ‘A new conceptual framework for psychiatry’, in American Journal of Psychiatry, 1997: ‘We are facing the interesting possibility that, since techniques of neuro-imaging are improving, these techniques may be useful not only for diagnosis of various neurotic illnesses but also for following up the progress of psychotherapy.’ In 2000 Eric R. Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for his work.

14. Erasmus, Eloge de la folie (In Praise of Folly), first edition, Paris, 1511. The book was reprinted 45 times in Erasmus's lifetime and translated into every language.

15. This is how the philosopher diagnoses those who rely on their fantasies and hallucinations rather than the experience of common sense.

16. Emmanuel Kant, Rêves d'un visionnaire, Paris, Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 1967, chap. 3: ‘Antikabbale. Fragment de philosophie commune, pour faire justice de ce commerce avec le monde des esprits’, p. 84.

17. Raymond Devos, ‘A plus d'un titre’, in L'Artiste, Paris, Olivier Orban, 1989, p. 12.

18. W. R. Bion, Second Thoughts, op. cit., chap. 7: ‘On Arrogance’ (text read at the 20th Congress of the International Psycho-analytical Association, Paris, July-August 1957) § 83: ‘In this paper I propose to deal with the appearance, in the material of a certain class of patient, of references to curiosity, arrogance and stupidity which are so dispersed and separated from each other that their relatedness may escape detection. I shall suggest that their appearance should be taken by the analyst as evidence that he is dealing with a psychological disaster. The meaning with which I will invest the term “arrogance” may be indicated by supposing that in the personality where life instincts predominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts predominate, pride becomes arrogance.’

‘Their separation from each other and the lack of evidence of any relatedness is evidence that a disaster has occurred. To make clear the connection between those references, I shall rehearse the Oedipus myth from the point of view which makes the sexual crime a peripheral element of the story in which the central crime is the arrogance of Oedipus in vowing to lay bare the truth at no matter what cost.’

19. In Jacques Lacan's meaning: the category of the Real is the category of what has no name or image, and which does not stop not writing itself. Madness is both the demonstration of this non-inscription and the attempt to construct the Other to make it possible.

20. Les Savoirs endogènes. Pistes pour une recherche, edited by Paulin Hountondji, Codresia, Dakar, 1994 (distribution Karthala, Paris).