ABSTRACT
In his book Culture and Explosion, Lotman studies the dynamics of culture using thefool and the madman as paradigm characters incarnating social change. Immersed in the space of a semiosphere, human acts gain meaning only in the context of the particular universe they take place in, when understood as a whole. Lotman invites us to consider the ternary structure fool/smart/crazy as a continuum where we can gauge individual and collective adequacy to the norm. Here, I summarize Lotman’s multifaceted description through my own lens with the aid of some examples centered on the notion of the fool and the madman in some representative spaces. I am particularly interested in finding paradigm changes through the reading of contemporary texts, or better said, through some complex manifestations of madness and stupidity, which are difficult to translate accurately without a subjective assessment.
KEYWORDS:
Lotman; Madman; Fool; Norm; Social change; Contemporary culture