In this essay, “The Taboo of Experience,” I use madness as method, processing in a kind of paranoid proof the experiences that led to my first psychotic break, which happened when I was teaching American Studies in Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

It’s a heady mix: Heidegger, Friedl, James, Coleridge, Beck, Stevens, and quite a few more. The connections make more sense to me than they probably will to any other reader, which is why I call it a paranoid proof, but it is a proof nevertheless — and the conclusion it led me to, that our cosmopolitan commitments, should we have them, are inextricable from our national identities, still seems to me utterly sane.