Sforzini, Arianna <br/><br/>
The creative truth of madness. The patient’s “agency” as an exercise in imagination 

 -  2024.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This article aims to examine the question of the subjective construction of psychiatric patients, based on a Foucauldian conception of the experience of madness as a form of subjectivation in an open space of power relations, which calls for an ethics or rather an “aesthetics” of care. In what senses, obviously multiple, can we say that madness is a “technique of the self”, a fiction caught between imposed truths and their incessant re-elaboration, projecting a style of existence and multiple forms of identity? What “truths”, what forces of veridiction, are mobilized in this construction? We will briefly analyze the history of an important concept in contemporary philosophical and political thought: the “agency”. This concept will allow to reflect on the clinical practice with regard to the subjects at stake. We will then relate this concept of “agency” to the notions of subjectivation and technique of existence, to consider the possibility of a Foucauldian re-elaboration of subjective experience in the field of mental health.