Roland Barthes on Madness, Fragment from A Lover's Discourse

“I am Crazy”

Fou/ mad
It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is or is going mad.

   1.    I am mad to be in love, I am not mad to be able to say so, I double my image: insane in my own eyes (I Know my delirium), simply unreasonable in the eyes of someone else, to whom I quite sanely describe my madness: conscious of this madness, sustaining a discourse upon it.

[…]

  2.    Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never – I am entitled only to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness: love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible; besides, it is entirely recuperated by the culture: it frightens no one. (Yet it is in the amorous state that certain rational subjects suddenly realize that madness is very close at hand, quite possible: a madness in which love itself would founder.)

-Roland Barthes