In the Margins: Louis Wolfson, Language, Literature, and a Dying Mother

Abstract

This article considers whether Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les langues (1970) constitutes a literary or a clinical document. Focusing on Gilles Deleuze’s reaction to Wolfson’s book, I analyse the ways in which Deleuze’s reading of Wolfson underwent significant changes from the time of his writing the preface to Le Schizo et les langues until he wrote about Wolfson again as part of Critique et Clinique (1993). I propose that Wolfson’s work and Deleuze’s shifting readings of it, destabilize hegemonic discourses within the Medical Humanities.

Keywords

• autobiography
• schizophrenia
• language
• illness narrative
• deleuze
• critical medical humanities
• louis wolfson