Abstract

The figure of the mad poet has engaged the cultural imagination of the West for more than two millennia. Traditionally, the mad poem appeared as an articulation of essentially unique and irreproducible character in contrast to philosophy as a controllable and repeatable process that strives to be self-legitimating. Madness thus plays a decisive role in the struggle for hegemony between discursive and poetic texts. The study examines the shift from metaphysics to what one may call Nietzsche's "meta-physiology," leading from a central divine presence in Plato to the absence of the Gods in Holderlin and the death of God in Nietzsche. ;While presenting madness as an alternative route to absolute truth that may be superior to philosophy, Plato simultaneously disowns the poets of reflective authority on the very grounds of the poets' madness, thus establishing the necessity for a separate critical discipline under the aegis of philosophy. Holderlin, still the quintessential mad poet to many critics, actually inverts this classical paradigm: his Sophocles translations and annotations suggest that it is philosophy which, during the "absence of the gods," is threatened to be drawn into the "abyss above" by transcendental desire, while poetry takes over the labor of constraint and conservation that Socrates had assigned to the philosophers. Nietzsche, then, finally shatters the very premises of a rationalistic culture where philosophy and poetry exclude each other. While madness plays an important role in his genealogy of morality, his work ultimately undermines the traditional assumptions about reason and truth that sustain the status of mad speech as authentic discourse. ;The thesis aims to work towards a better understanding of both the rationalist and the anti-rationalist elements in Western culture at large, for the mad poet is still haunting our thought on literature at a time where psycho-analysis and related events in modern intellectual history have seemingly rendered not only the idea of authorship but the very term of madness obsolete