Abstract EN:

Anchored in the field of discourse analysis, this dissertation studies a corpus of letters which were written by patients interned in pyschiatric institutions located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. These letters were initially kept in the archives of the psychiatric institutions, but are now archived at the Collection de l’Art Brut, in Lausanne. Such an institutional transfer leads one to ponder on the current modalities of reception of these texts. To answer this question, a theory of language is needed. Enunciation theory (Benveniste) is particularly apt to analyse and to conceptualize language from the perspective of the interlocutor. Besides, enunciation theory opens to discursivity, enriching the corpus with a dialogical dimension which is here channelled around the theme of madness. The question which is then raised is the following : in which respect do the works of art brut exceed their status as clinical documents ? Coined by Gérard Dessons, the conceptual couple « manie » / « manière » allows one to conceptualize within language the shift of point of view which is required by the corpus. What is at stake, in broad outline, is to get rid of rhetorics to the benefit of a poetics of enunciation. The challenge is to quit thinking language on the basis of categories (such as genre, but also sign) which preexist texts and which are only able to capture variations on models (or worse, abnormalities, even symptoms) : one has to approach these texts according to the processes and, more globally and radically, according to the specific (and thus unnameable up until then – which is why they « drive one crazy ») modes of signification which they set up. This criticism of widely accepted conceptualities and this reversal of perspective form the epistemological knot of my dissertation.