Letting Madness In: Toward Hospitality Without Incarceration

Abstract

Inspired by Of Hospitality, which consists of two texts on facing pages by Anne Dufourmantelle and Jacques Derrida, Erin Soros and Richard Ingram collabo-rated to hone in on an aporia in Dufourmantelle and Derrida’s meditation on hospitality. The writing of this collaborative work took place through hospital-ity: the authors invited each other into their homes, and altered the texts of the host, rendering thresholds porous and troubling the ways in which madness is circumscribed and contained. Why are some forms of asylum considered and others only to be passed over? In the present article, Erin Soros uses Derrida to critique the madness of Ontario and British Columbia’s mental health acts, in which rights are stripped f rom the Mad through a system of carceral psychia-try and a logic that is haunted by its own madness. In a companion text (to be published in TOPIA 44), Richard Ingram focuses on two aspects of Derrida’s topology of hospitality, addressing the acts of letting madness into a dwelling and letting madness into the mind.