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Delusion is an exceptional test case for the principal categories of common sense and philosophical thought such as 'reason', 'truth' and 'reality'. Via an engagement with the legacy of Freud and the most remarkable results of 20th-century psychiatry, my aim will be to analyse its paradoxical forms and to shed light on the logics that underlie and orient its specific modalities of temporalization, conceptualization and argumentation.
In English the term 'delusion' may be used in the sense of 'illusion', but it can also be used to indicate what in the romance languages we call 'delirio' or 'délire', and the etymology of this word is significant. Its origin lies in a peasant metaphor, in the act of de-lirare, of overstepping the lira, the piece of ground bounded by two furrows. The idea of moving beyond the area of sown ground also has connotations of sterility and excess. Like Odysseus, who feigned madness by ploughing the sand, people suffering from delusions struggle vainly to cultivate soil that will not bear fruit, turning their backs on the fertile fields of reason.
Delusion, then, has traditionally been presented as synonymous with irrationality (absurdity, groundlessness, error, chaos), whereas its mirror image, reason, has been defined as what is self-evident, demonstrable, true and orderly. Over time the two concepts have become complementary.
So, aside from any play on words, why should we talk of the logics of delusion'? The first step towards persuading oneself that it is not a baroque paradox is not to let onself be influenced by the seriousness that terms such as logos and 'logic' have acquired, since legein refers to gathering, sifting and ordering. If that is so, nothing prevents us from talking about one or more logics of delusion, by which we mean specific modes - however anomalous - of articulating perceptions, images, thoughts, beliefs, affects and moods, according to principles of their own, which therefore do not conform to the criteria of argumentation and expression shared by a particular society.
It might be objected that such logics are not within the scope of our reason, that it simply rejects them; or else that we should resist the temptation - as Roger Caillois has said in relation to dreams1 - to regard delusion as any...