This work explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. It seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label madness . Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge? Every literary text continues to communicate with madness - with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable - by dramatizing a revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable.