In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society.

Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?. Parnal Chirmuley is associate professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

FOREWORD by W.J.T. Mitchell
INTRODUCTION – A HISTORY OF NULLITIES
CREATION FROM NOTHINGNESS
THE REJECTION OF THE WORLD
The history of the word „idiot”
Revaluation of values
The abolition of time
FOOLS
The ship of fools – Sebastian Brant
Praise of folly – Erasmus of Rotterdam
Opicinus de Canistris and Hugo van der Goes
JURODIVYJ
ON SOME FILMS OF ANDREJ TARKOVSKI
THE IDIOT IN THE ASYLUM
THE REDEEMER
THE IDIOT REVOLTING
Art of Forgetting
Illness as motive and projective stimulus
Art of the Mentally Ill
ACTIONISM, FLUXUS AND POP
Performance of regression
Criticism and Shamanism
Cynism
Indiffernce and subversion
PUNK
Precursors
Punk, Industrial and Geniale Dilletanten
THE PRESENCE OF THE IDIOT