Review of Bruce's work on madness highlights its challenge to Reason in Western episteme, indicating profound implications.
La Marr Jurelle Bruce, the author of How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, writes with literary flair about a subject that has fascinated philosophers, literary scholars, and poets for centuries: the subversive character of madness. He does not conceive of this subversiveness as a threat to academic thought. Rather, he incorporates madness into his academic method, while simultaneously allowing it to challenge that methodical work. After all, the enemy of madness is, according to Bruce, academically upheld Reason – with a capitalized R. By this, Bruce means the Western episteme that is rooted in Enlightenment thought and dominated by positivism, secularism, and the belief that the quest for objective truth is fruitful (Bruce, 2021, p. 4). This Reason was and is used as an instrument of domination, exercising control over those who do not fit into the status quo and serving as a justification for the conquering of ‘Others’. In his analysis of the exclusionary nature of Reason, Bruce is indebted to thinkers like Achille Mbembe, Hortense Spillers, and Michel Foucault.
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Iris Kater Mirsalari (2025) studied this question.
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