Madness and life as work of art

Abstract

In the end of his book  Histoire de la folie, Michel Foucault concludes his research dealing with the life of the artist and the madness issues. I stand that it was the first time Foucault outlined what he later called “life as a work of art”. The crazy life of the artists can be confronted with the mad life of alienated people produced in austere institutions like the hospices, carried on in Brazil-Rio de Janeiro by Nise da Silveira. With so much art, directly or indirectly linked to religion, as insisted the German philosopher Max Stirner, the reading of the Histoire de la folie establishes a relevant provenance to the problematisation of the “life as an work of art” notion, situated by Foucault within the individual as the place where begins ethics and politics. Given the new connections made in the passage of the twentieth century to the current century, concerning the administration of madness, no longer as a mental illness, but as disorders that cross all the normal people, which kind of work of art can every single person stir up in oneself as freedom that confronts the participatory democracy?