Follia Senza Genio: dreaming mad archival encounters

Keywords: Madness, disability, Italy, archives, horror
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper moves from an ostensible research trip to Bologna’s library archives to a fragmented detour through visual productions of film, city, and historical text, constellating a varied and contingent archive of madness and resistance in Italy. I consider how Cesare Lombroso’s 19th c. ideas on criminality and madness are encountered not only in historical texts and in legal and carceral histories, but repeatedly, though at times covertly, through dreamlike visual encounters with objects such as political graffiti and giallo films–namely Argento’s Profondo Rosso (1975) and Cat O’ Nine Tails (1971). Grappling with debates around what constitutes an archive and its parameters, psychoanalytic geographies’ contentions of topological space, and Benjamin’s ‘dialectical images’, I consider how research on histories of both pathologization and mad subjectivities should exceed the logics and institutions that produce experiences of these phenomena. This paper instead emphasizes localized research encounters, the simultaneous nonlinearity and continuity of historical space and genealogical inquiries, and (more-than-)visual representations of the unknowable. Spanning the late 19th c., the 1970s, and our current moment, this experimental paper attempts to spur thinking around methodological approaches that do not render discrete diverse visual cultural and medical productions, but rather that which understands them as reverberating within a fluctuating archival landscape.