Dr. Marlon Miguel

Marlon Miguel is Co-Principal Investigator at the project Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) and Philosophy (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). His PhD research focused on the work of Fernand Deligny and he is responsible for the organization and classification of Deligny’s archives stored at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC). His most recent edition in this domain is Camérer. A propos d’images by Fernand Deligny with L’Arachnéen (edited together with with Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, Anaïs Masson, and Marina Vidal-Naquet), as well as Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema And The Image, Leiden University Press, 2022.

His current research focuses on the intersection between contemporary philosophy, art, anthropology, and psychiatry. He also practices contemporary circus and makes practical movement research. 

 

His current individual project proposes to critically inquire the notion of ‘disorder’ and to de-essentialize it, looking at the use of artistic media in alternative radical psychiatric practices such as those of François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Fernand Deligny and Nise da Silveira. These figures propose to look at the individual's singular and concrete experience of suffering, their current state experienced, rather than their ‘condition’. They also displace the treatment from the figure of the psychiatrist towards the action of the milieu itself. Such practices were realized through a multifaceted use of media and material practices of mediation.

In collaboration with art critic Mário Pedrosa, Nise da Silveira insisted on the autonomy of form, paying close attention to the work of art, while simultaneously criticizing the rationality justifying the exclusion of the mentally ill. The ‘mad’ are seen neither outside modern art nor as a model of transgression, but, as Pedrosa puts it, ‘they see everything simultaneously from inside and from outside’. In a certain sense, da Silveira and Pedrosa anticipate Foucault’s well-known claim from The History of Madness that ‘there is no madness where there is work [of art]’.