Shoshana Felman's book Writing and Madness was first published in French as La Folie et la chose littéraire. The English translation leaves out some of the literary analyses of Nerval and Balzac that were in the original book, no doubt because they are too technical for English readers, but that is made up for by two additional interviews with Jacques-Alain Miller and Philippe Sollers and a new preface by the author.

Writing and Madness was a book that I wanted to like as a whole - its topic is certainly an interesting and timely one - but I found that I could only relate to it in bits and pieces. Felman starts out by articulating the difficulties of speaking madness, as outlined by Michel Foucault in [b:History of Madness|770903|History of Madness|Michel Foucault|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1486327755s/770903.jpg|756961]. She then plunges into the intricacies of the debate between Foucault and Derrida (Ch.2), paying careful attention to how both thinkers problematize questions of writing, philosophy, and literature in their attempts to write about madness. This section is easily one of the best in the book.

Unfortunately, Felman rather loses her way after this point. The chapters on Nerval's Aurelia (Ch.3), Flaubert's Memoirs of a Madman (Ch.4), and Balzac's "The Illustrious Gaudissart" (Ch.5) are dry and technical, and contain few genuinely new insights as far as I was concerned. Maybe others would find them more interesting.

I didn't get much insight, either, from the chapter on Jacques Lacan, which I found to be more verbose than genuinely difficult (Ch.6). Felman's point about the impossibility of Lacan's task, that he appears to be trying to create a universal grammar of the particularities of rhetoric, is an interesting one, but it would have made far more sense to connect this to Alfred Jarry's 'pataphysics, the absurdist "science of the particular." Doing so would have tied what Lacan was doing far more clearly to the issue of madness, which seemed to get lost in a lot of technical considerations.

The substance of Felman's book closes with an extensive meditation on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (Ch.7). More correctly, it is an analysis of the failure of Edmund Wilson's psychoanalytic interpretation of the text and others like it, with Felman showing how James constructs his text as a "trap" designed not only to capture the unwary, but more especially, the wary, sophisticated reader. At one hundred pages in length, Felman's analysis drags on for far too long, but the last few pages are a superb literary application of Lacan's idea that the "non-dupes err" - namely, that those who think they see the truth are as deluded as those who do not.

The closing chapter and the interview with Miller are too short to be of much interest, but Sollers does a fine job of teasing out the motivations and nuances of Felman's ideas.

On the whole I felt as though Writing and Madness was a major letdown. The opening sections begin with such richness and promise - especially the chapter on the Foucault/Derrida debate - but Felman's decision to proceed after that glorious beginning in the most oblique way possible, through a series of literary readings that nibble around the edges of her original topic, is a major disappointment. I also have to say that I'm not particularly enamored by her style. When she hits on a good idea her prose really soars, but too much of her writing I found to be technical and clever rather than genuinely insightful. ( )