Eco di una voce infame. Per un’archeologia del silenzio manicomiale

La vie des hommes infâmes is the title of a projected anthology of psychiatric case histories that Michel Foucault never completed and of which only the introduction survives. Miserable, abject, and forgotten, these were lives “destined to pass beneath all discourse and disappear without ever having been spoken,” leaving traces only at the moment of their encounter with power (Foucault 1994, p. 22). Trapped within the invisible web of psychiatric authority, they were condemned to silence through institutional mechanisms of surveillance, control, and coercion. This paper stems from an archival research project conducted over several years and situated within broader semiotic investigations into Siena and its symbolic imaginaries. It examines the relationship between subjection and self-expression, normality and deviance, power and representation, through a comparative analysis of two distinct textual forms: a psychiatric case file, understood as a dispositif of institutional control, and a handwritten letter by a patient preserved within that file, interpreted as an act of subjectivation. Particular attention is devoted to the patient’s self-writing practices and to their strategies of veridiction, action, and passion in a Greimasian perspective. Against this background, the article focuses on a form of silence emerging from the plea of a former First World War soldier who had lost his voice and was consequently confined to the San Niccolò Psychiatric Hospital in Siena. Drawing on Louis Marin’s reflections on the “excommunicated voice,” the paper argues that this testimony can only be understood by considering the conjunction—however dissonant—of image and voice within writing. The patient’s letter is thus approached as a narrated image and as a tactical operation of the self, through which an individual rendered doubly silent by the forces operating within the psychiatric institution sought to recover a space of enunciation and recognition.