“From the provocative, entertaining, and always original mind of W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Madness is an invitation to peer through the matrix of our surreal and unsettling times. Inside these pages, he invokes ‘madness’ as a fundamental concept for looking beyond the individual in isolation, toward the deeper truths and impulses of the human condition we all share. Seeing Through Madness couldn’t be more relevant to our moment. Required reading for anyone who believes that human beings are rational animals.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

“Seeing Through Madness unsettles notions of sanity and insanity, making visceral that ‘madness’ is inseparable from Western consciousness and art. Mitchell lays the foundations for both a resistance to clinical and taxonomic containment and the imagining of a collective Atlas of Madness — provisional, contradictory, and resistant to closure.”

Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want

“Mitchell’s Seeing Through Madness unites his familiar acuity as perhaps our premier interpreter of iconology with his remarkable personal engagement with thinking through and with histories of madness in what are indisputably crazy times.”

Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University

“An extraordinary study that navigates deftly across the domains of iconology, psychiatry, forensic science, political philosophy, film theory, and digital technology (among others), Seeing Through Madness is in equal measure a vast visual atlas of madness and a theoretical dissection of the evidence it offers of our current planetary condition. Without romanticizing schizophrenia, Mitchell ‘sees through’ the critical framework it affords on the behavior of a species gone ‘mad.’ Inspired by a project on which Mitchell collaborated with his son Gabriel years ago, Seeing Through Madness both fulfills Gabriel’s vision of a Bilderatlas of madness and infuses it with the knowledge gleaned by the lifelong study of culture, politics and iconology. With Mitchell’s signature blend of incisiveness, originality, wit, and prophetic rage, Seeing Through Madness will wrench us out of our blindness to our destruction of our planet and ourselves.”

Elizabeth Abel, University of California, Berkeley

“Many psychiatrists can treat serious mental illness, but only W. J. T. Mitchell can put madness to work. From the January 6 mob to William Blake, from the ship of fools to the family refrigerator door, this is a dazzling, brilliant, and fearless tour through the madness in our politics, our art, our lives, and our culture. Learning to look differently, so as to think differently, never seemed so illuminating and necessary.”

Stevan Weine, MD, University of Illinois Chicago