At his death, Freud was confirmed in his status as icon by W. H. Auden, who famously referred to him as “a whole climate of opinion.” Reading Writing and Madness, one has the sense of an author grappling with the challenge posed, however surreptitiously, by the poet. Indeed, originally published in 1978 as La Folie et la chose littéraire, and in English translation some seven years later, the volume seeks to define modern literature (both high and post-) by its relation to psychoanalysis. More precisely, it seeks “literature's constitutive relation to what culture has excluded under the label ‘madness’”; it aims also to uncover the means by which the writer, in reclaiming the “discourse of the madman,” dramatizes “something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge” (p. 2).