Farber’s Reimagined Mad Pride: Strategies for Messianic Utopian Leadership

In this article, I explore Seth Farber’s critique, in The Spiritual Gift of Madness, that the leaders of the Mad Pride movement are failing to realize his vision of the mad as spiritual vanguard of sociopolitical transformation. First, I show how, contra Farber’s polemic, several postmodern theorists are well suited for this leadership (especially the Argentinian post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau). I reinterpret the first book by the Icarus Project, Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness, by reimagining its central metaphor of Icarus. And I conclude with four strategies for higher functioning mad folks to transform our penitentiary world.