I am honored to pressent this talk at the Psychiatrie and Filosofie conference, “Too Mad to be True: MAdness and Its Expressions”, in Ghent, Belgium on May 14, 2026.. https://www.psychiatrieenfilosofie.nl/too-mad-to-be-true-iv

Paper Title: A Black at once Revelatory and Mundane: Depression, night and mystery

Paper Abstract

Black. I first encountered this in depression, in the wistful desire for oblivion. I also encountered this in psychotic collapse, as a vision of a blind spot, a gap through which I fell into a manic realm of divine, poetically “apocalyptic” signs.

Is this black simply oblivion, trauma or melancholia? Perhaps the ways we name things can kill us. Especially the ineffable, the indiscernible.

Louis Sass used Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the eye to clarify some kinds of delusion schizophrenics have. “The eye nowhere appears in its field”, and yet in some sense, the ‘I’ is ‘seen’ by the psychotic and mis-recognized as quasi-mystical experience. I adopt this metaphor of the eye to elaborate on the “blind spot” in being, knowledge and language – and perform this in relation to my own experiences of madness. I wish to invoke other writers who wrote on night – Levinas, Badiou, Kristeva – as infinite other, as void, as chora, as daimon.

To perform this black, not simply in its errancy, but its imbrication with love and fidelity – a black at once revelatory and mundane, by which one cohabits with depression and sanity.