DARIAN LEADERWhat is Madness?

What is it, first of all, that acts on us from outside? As infants, it is our caregivers, whose discourse we are born into. We depend almost totally on them, and our own subjectivity tends to be asserted and formed through acts of refusal. When we say no to being fed, for example, we show that we are different from them, that we are not simply their puppets. If we can do this through action, we can also do it through speech, but this is complicated by the fact that speech, initially, comes from them. We learn words through them, and if we accept that thinking relies on verbal structures, our thought, at a certain level, derives from them too.