STIC 2 (1) pp.

6980 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in Comics
Volume 2 Number 1
2011 Intellect Ltd Ideology. English language. doi: 10.1386/stic.2.1.69_1

DENEB KOZIKOSKI VALERETO

Leiden University

Philosophy in the fairground:

Thoughts on madness and madness
in thought in The Killing Joke
Keywords

Abstract

The Killing Joke

madness
Derrida
Foucault
philosophy
reason
rationality

This article aims at proposing a reading of the function of madness in Alan Moores The Killing Joke and
establishing a link between the graphic novel and philosophical thought on madness and rationality. The
article focuses on the character of the Joker and on the intricacies of his relationship to madness as the
element that inspires and informs the epistemological mode through which he perceives and organizes his
knowledge of reality. Instead of addressing the question of whether the Joker is mad, the article seeks to
answer the following questions: In what sense can madness be read as a force that epistemologically regulates the Jokers discourse? and Can the presence of madness be read as disrupting philosophical thought on
madness? In order to address these questions, the philosophical debate on madness between Michel Foucault
and Jacques Derrida is laid out both in the attempt to establish a link between the two thinkers and The
Killing Joke and to set the grounds for an investigation of madness and rationality in the graphic novel. It is

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argued that the presence of madness in the Jokers discourse elevates madness to the same status as reason,
and hence creates the space for the denunciation of the complicity of the subject of thought.

What is the sense of reason? Thoughts on madness in The Killing Joke

In a crucial moment in the graphic novel The Killing Joke, the Joker forces Commissioner Gordon to
take a ride through the tortuous paths of memory, reason and insanity. In a prescriptive tone, he
tells Commissioner Gordon:
So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for places where
the screaming is unbearable, remember theres always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
(Moore et al. 2008: 21)
Madness figures as one of the most salient forces in The Killing Joke. The unpredictability of the
Jokers plans to disrupt order in Gotham City and his tragic past function as textual evidence to
support a reading of his character as mad; nevertheless, his reflections on madness and rationality in
The Killing Joke demonstrate that such a dichotomy cannot be addressed from a merely oppositional
perspective. Undoubtedly, the question Is the Joker mad? is one that many readers have asked. Yet,
positing the Joker essentially as a subject of madness jeopardizes the philosophical complexity of the
Jokers traversal through the fields of reason and madness a traversal that is at once staggering and
ambivalent, as I intend to show in this reading of The Killing Joke. Folly, eccentricity, wit and the
heartlessness of the Jokers crimes are elements akin to the ways in which madness has been
described and characterized in various discourses and practices, ranging from praises of folly to
psychiatric and legal treatments of insanity. Nevertheless, it can hardly be ignored that the Joker,
too, entertains a descriptive, prescriptive and objectifying relation to madness when he says madness
is the emergency exit. It is in this sense that the Jokers traversal through the fields of reason and
madness is staggering and ambivalent. While on the one hand the character of the Joker invites us
to read him as mad, on the other he himself gazes at, reflects and defines madness. Clearly, the
Jokers plasticity is signaled in the very fact that he is a wild card; yet, plasticity should be read in the
strongest sense since it opens the doors to conceptualizing the Joker through a field wherein institutional, medical, legal and philosophical codes meet and interact. In Nomad Thought (1999) Gilles
Deleuze lists laws, contracts and institutions as means of codification that both establish a codified
object and regulate the individuals relation to it (1999: 142). Although Deleuzes essay on Nietzsches
thought is not investigated here, his approach to the question of opening thought to new forces will
prove insightful at the end of this reading.

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Moores graphic novel upsets order in staging the encounter between these codes so as to
confound and deterritorialize them. The realization that the Jokers character confounds the institutional, psychiatric and legal codifications of madness with the re-emission of his own conceptualization of the lack of reason reflects some of the critical potentials of Moores graphic novel. If
oppositions themselves fall apart, and with them their conceptual tools for the incarceration of
madness, how can we interpret Moores graphic novel? What is at stake in The Killing Joke is not a
question of being able to tell the rational from the non-rational, the sane from the insane; instead, it
is a matter of detecting how madness circulates and how madness is codified by the practices alluded
to in the graphic novel. Following this lead I would like to read The Killing Joke focusing on the character of the Joker to examine the ways in which madness functions as a concept, more specifically as
an epistemological one. My use of the term epistemological mode is a rough attempt to both simplify
my reading of the graphic novel and establish a link between madness, thought on madness and
rationality, and the ways in which madness allows the Joker to know the reality that surrounds him.
To address the question of thought on madness I connect The Killing Joke to the critical exchange on
madness between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to understand how the graphic novel diverges
from some of the issues that emerged in the exchange. I will open this analysis with a brief overview
of Derridas and Foucaults major insights as instances of philosophical approaches to madness.

Thought on madness
In Madness and Civilization, the abridged version of History of Madness (1961), Foucault establishes
an archaeology of silence in the attempt to write the history of madness. Generally speaking,
Foucaults aim is to trace the progressions of western cultures relation to madness since the Middle
Ages. Foucault wants to show how madness has been opposed to reason and excluded from rational
discourses in western culture. Foucaults archaeology of silence seeks to excavate the procedures and
historical conditions that allowed a specific knowledge on madness to emerge, which, in mutual
coalition with power, dictates how madness is to be dealt with. Writing the history of madness,
however, does not mean writing about madness itself, but rather drawing a structural study of the
historical ensemble notions, institutions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts which
hold captive a madness whose wild state can never itself be restored (Foucault in Rose 1992: 142).
In the preface of Madness and Civilization, Foucault says, we shall have to speak of this act of scission, of this distance set, this void instituted between reason and what is not reason, without ever
relying upon the fulfillment of what it claims to be (2009: xii). Foucault demonstrates that the void
had been instituted through the gazes of religion, men of morals, alienists, the state and science,
among other social, discursive and non-discursive spaces. Foucault often refers to these and other
spaces of reason as experiences of madness. As Colin Gordon explains, the term experience

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designates the ways in which madness can be an object for different domains of social practice
(1992: 38). We can thus speak of a scientific, psychiatric or legal experience of madness.
In fact, the scientific and medical experiences of madness are not exclusive to recent centuries. The
systematic, epistemological and institutional developments that grounded psychiatry as a science
investigating forms of madness can be traced to the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
Within the medical and psychiatric discourses, madness was increasingly assessed in terms of mental
illnesses to be diagnosed and remedied. While the diagnostic and pathological investigations of
psychiatry do reflect its attempt to establish itself as a rigorous science, Foucault argues that the presence and the power of the medical personage in asylums is less of a scientific requirement than moral
and juridical ones (2009: 257). Foucaults insight is of crucial relevance, since psychiatrys systematization of mental illness often obscures the fact that the requirement for a medical science addressing the
vicissitudes of madness is, perhaps more importantly, a requirement that emerges from the maintenance of public and private moral conduct, as well as justice. As Nikolas Rose explains, [p]sychiatry
would promise the restoration of the insane and disenfranchised inmate to the capacity of functioning
citizen, subject of law and morality (1992: 146). It is in this sense that we should grasp the intricate
and intrinsic association between madness and criminality, between deviance as insanity and deviance as crime. This association is evident in The Killing Joke, as I will show in the following section.
Though Foucaults archeological, historical and philosophical work traces important progressions in modes of apprehending madness, his archaeology of the silence of madness has not been
exempted from criticism. Foucaults concern with the silence of madness is in fact one of the aspects
of his projects that Derrida criticizes in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (1978).
According to Derrida, the archaeology of silence is itself an order that functions based on logic; an
archaeology is an organized language, to borrow his formulation (1978: 35). This means that
Foucaults attempt to write the history of madness is itself a form of entrapping madness and is thus
not essentially different or exempted from the charge of violence that other languages such as
psychiatry carry. For Derrida, all these organized languages (Foucaults archaeology, psychiatry,
science, history and so forth) have a common root: logos. Derrida argues that,
If the Order of which we are speaking is so powerful, if its power is unique of its kind, this is
precisely by virtue of the universal, structural and infinite complicity in which it compromises
those who understand it in its own language, even when this language provides them with
the form of their own denunciation.
(1978: 35)
This is to say that logocentric order comprises anyone who makes use of its language, regardless of
the extent to which it is used. It makes those who use it its accomplices. Logocentrism grounds both

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thought and the language that sets itself to negate thought. Though Foucault himself acknowledges
the impossibility of restoring to madness some form of true ontology, Derridas critique aims at
showing that the very project of tracing the origins and the rise of certain experiences and apprehensions of madness is not exempted from the foundational complicity between logos and the exclusion of madness (1978: 36). The exclusion of madness by reason is more than just a discontinuous
historical process.
Contrary to Foucaults suggestion, Derrida claims that the exclusion of madness from language and
from reason is fundamental, essential to languages purpose, which is to make sense. Derrida says,
the sentence is normal. It carries normality within it, that is, sense, in every sense of the word
[] it does so whatever the state, whatever the health or madness of him who propounds it
[]. In its most impoverished syntax, logos is reason and, indeed, a historical reason.
(1978: 54)
Normality should be read in its strongest sense, for a norm (an order, a rule) must exist if one is to
make sense of what someone says. Whoever partakes in the normality of the sentence is bound to
the codifications that dictate sense, and to reason. Consequently, the formulation language of
madness is an impossibility. Once that which madness speaks makes sense, however minimally,
madness is liable to be subjected as an object of thought. In addition to raising questions about the
inevitable logocentric import of Foucaults work and asserting other interpretive and conceptual
points of divergence, Derridas salient critique should not be read as a total rejection of Foucaults
Histoire de la Folie. Instead, Derridas essay, as Dominick LaCapra suggests in his own account of the
criticism against Derridas alleged misunderstanding of Foucault, [i]s best seen as a radical yet
sympathetic rereading that destabilizes and repositions certain crucial elements of Foucaults argument (1992: 81).

Disruptions of thought in The Killing Joke

While madness is a crucial force in The Killing Joke and more specifically in the Jokers conceptual
and epistemological attitude, I will not read Moores graphic novel so as to mediate the philosophical and methodological divergences between Foucault and Derrida. My reading of The Killing Joke
aims instead at showing how the Jokers position towards madness complicates the very possibility
of approaching madness both by tracing historical ensembles and by tackling the issue through the
order of language. It is in not rendering itself comprehensible either by an analysis of the means of
the codification and objectification of madness, or by an appeal to logocentric orders imposition of
a fundamental complicity that The Killing Joke disrupts philosophical thought on madness. Moreover,

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the Jokers plastic position as a character subjected to means of objectification and regulation of
madness, and as a character who himself gazes at and approaches madness, calls for an alternative
conceptualization of the multiple figurations of madness in the graphic novel. Before moving to the
conceptualization of the Jokers approach and relation to madness, I will elaborate on the elements
of the graphic novel that do render themselves graspable through the philosophical instances
exposed in the previous section and move to how The Killing Joke complicates them.
Many elements present in The Killing Joke undeniably resonate with the practices investigated by
Foucault, as well as with Derridas problematization of his historical account of modes of exclusion
and the regulation of madness. The very opening of the narrative introduces Arkham Asylum,
Gotham Citys internment facility for the criminally insane. Although the asylum figures only for a
few pages before the Jokers escape, it clearly exemplifies the incarceration of the madman as a
means of protecting civil order and the citizens liberty. Considering Foucaults delineation of the
asylums different forms and the transformations asylums have undergone as spaces where madness
could be regulated, treated, seen and experienced, Arkham Asylum would most likely figure as an
institution where mental illness and crime have already been fused. As an asylum for the criminally
insane, Arkham suggests that the subjects crimes cannot be dissociated from his mental condition.
The medical legitimization of the patients physical conditions authorizes the incarceration of the
insane as an individual who is unable to fulfil the requirements of legal personhood, social conduct
and citizenship in general. Despite the subjects loss of his or her legal and civil capabilities because
of the medical warrant for insanity, the disenfranchised subject recovers some of these capabilities
within the space of Arkham Asylum. When Batman goes to Arkham to get his questions answered
he aggressively grabs the Jokers head. The Joker says Hey! Wait a minute! Dont you touch me! I
got rights! Youre not allowed to (Moore et al. 2008: 5). Soon after, Commissioner Gordon enters
and prevents Batman from going any further, Okay, thats enough! You know the laws regarding
the treatment of inmates as well as I do! If you harm one hair on his head (Moore et al. 2008: 5).
The Jokers internment as an inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane subjects him to institutional regulations, laws and the gaze of those who are involved in sustaining the asylum and its
inmates as elements that create the institutional experience of madness.
Another figuration of the officialization of the Jokers madness is Commissioner Gordons
archive of newspaper articles featuring the Joker and Batman. Asylum security uproar, Maniac
escapes again, says the headline of the Gotham Examiner (Moore et al. 2008: 12). The next headline says, Bat-Garbed vigilante critically injures murderer, Disfigured homicidal maniac in hospital
(Moore et al. 2008: 12). Though the words maniac and murderer allude to the Jokers derision,
Batmans rather questionable relation to reason and to law is also signaled in the allusions to his
costume and to his vigilance, a mode of operation that aims at protecting order although it does so
outside the law. Commissioner Gordons collection of newspapers creates a minor history of the

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Jokers acts of madness and criminality. The fact that newspapers register and communicate the
events of Gotham City only enhances the channels of codification of the Jokers madness, since they
attest to the Jokers condition as maniac and work to maintain the continuity between institutional
knowledge (Arkham Asylum), power (Gothams police, authorized internment) over his condition
and public opinion.
While The Killing Joke cleverly makes these different yet interdependent practices meet (psychiatry, law, institution, media), reading them as evidence for a claim to the Jokers somewhat true
ontological madness is to miss the point. We would not only fail to see the repressive side of these
means of apprehending madness, but we would consequently flatten the Jokers character to that of
a villain who operates beyond the law or in the underworld, which is no different from what Batman
himself or other villains do. The point I want to make is that the Jokers relation to madness cannot
be reduced to the elements in the graphic novel that signal or allude to the Jokers madness. This is
the case for two reasons, one of which I have already alluded to. First, the means of the codification
of madness are experiences and modes of apprehending madness they are not madness proper.
Second, the Joker entertains a peculiar relation to madness because he also wants to grasp and
create a form of madness and even put it to practice, as his plan to drive Commissioner Gordon mad
reveals. Before moving on to the elaboration of this second claim, let us return to the question of
how The Killing Joke and the Joker complicate the possibility of approaching madness through historical ensembles and the archaeology of silence, as Foucault does, or through the deconstructive
uncovering of the [h]istorical responsibility of this logic of archaeology (Derrida 1978: 35).
The Jokers complicated and tortuous past is one of the elements of The Killing Joke that most
evidently perform the difficulties of returning to the origins of the experience of madness, writing its
history and overcoming the inevitable rationality of such history. The first problem the graphic
novels narrative poses is that the history of the Jokers madness is only provided as a parallel
narrative to the reader. Whether the Joker himself knows how he came to be the Joker is ambiguous
since he says that if he is to have a past he prefers it to be multiple choice (Moore et al. 2008: 39).
Moreover, the other characters do not have access to that narrative either, as Batmans search for
information on the Joker demonstrates. In this sense, The Killing Joke stages what Foucault describes
as the act of scission, [], this void instituted between reason and what is not reason (2009: xii).
The only ones who have access to the dissension between the Jokers supposed reason and his
subsequent madness are we, the readers, who also happen to be grasping the episode of the Jokers
transition from the outside. Thus, the Jokers madness is something we read as a cleavage, where
reason and madness are supposedly separated. The origins of madness are indeed something
Commissioner Gordon, Batman and probably the Joker himself cannot return to within the realm of
reason as separated from madness. In this realm, the Jokers madness is accessed through channels
such as Arkham Asylum, the newspapers headlines and Batmans search for the Jokers civil name,

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age and relatives. By looking at these experiences and registers of madness we do not return to the
origins of the Jokers madness, but we establish the cartography of the circulation of his madness. If
we conceptualize such cartography as Derrida reads Foucaults archaeology of silence, such cartography is not exempted from reason or from the normality of logocentric language, which aims at
making sense. The Jokers own relation to madness, on the other hand, is one where madness is
also given a specific sense. Yet, if we read such sense as the sense Derrida speaks of when he says
the sentence is normal and logos is reason we jeopardize the insights that emerge thanks to the
Jokers destabilization of the opposition between reason and madness (1978: 54). Thus, while The
Killing Joke stages the legal, psychiatric and institutional experiences and codifications of madness, as
well as the problem of approaching the history of his madness, the philosophical impasse that
emerges in the exchange between Foucault and Derrida shows that the Jokers madness is not
merely a result of such codifications, experiences and historys silencing complicity to logos. The
Jokers madness traverses through reason to give reason another sense, one that is perhaps best
understood as an epistemological mode where reason is maddened.

A mad traversal through reason: The Jokers epistemological mode of madness

The Jokers transition from comedian to the Joker already contains the first mark of his destabilization of madness as that which reason excludes and as something that receives sense within the
order of a normative logos. From then on the narrative begins to show how madness becomes the
alternative epistemological mode that allows the Joker to make sense of reality, albeit in a different
and paradoxical sense, as he seeks to teach this mode to Commissioner Gordon. In the face of his
failure as a comedian, the arbitrariness of his pregnant wifes death and his disastrous involvement
with the Red Hood mob, the Joker reacts not with an appeal to reason to a form of rationality that
would allow him to make sense of the chaos of reality and organize this chaos into a narrative, a
history but with laughter (Moore et al. 2008: 32). The Joker laughs after having been through tragic
events, but the fact that he laughs and continues to joke about having one bad day is not merely a
sign of madness. Instead, it reveals the Jokers realization that reason, in its normative sense, does
not suffice to reflect upon life, and all its random injustice, to borrow his words (Moore et al.
2008: 26). To be able to cope with reality, as the Joker sees it, one must shatter both the complicity
between logos and the normalizing sense it gives to reason so as to be able to reason in another way.
The possibility of reasoning through a non-normative and non-logocentric-oriented thought is
precisely what he wants Commissioner Gordon to realize. As Commissioner Gordon is about to
begin his ride and see the pictures of his daughters crippling, the Joker reminds us that he has
discarded his memories: But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based
upon, if we cant face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We arent contractually tied

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down to rationality! (Moore et al. 2008: 21). Instead of organizing his memories into a coherent
order, a structure or a history, the Joker discards rationality as a necessary condition to live. For him,
one can in fact live without facing memories and therefore without reason. However, the Jokers
view that reason is contingent does not mean he is doing away with reason altogether. It means that
those who cannot face memories must also be able to operate under a different epistemological
mode and a different way of reasoning about the world. One has to be able to bear the burdens that
arise once the sanity clause is broken. In addition to going against Derridas argument that logocentric order compromises anyone who makes use of its language, the Jokers breach of contract is a
productive one, since the breach frees reason from the logocentric codification of reason (1978: 35).
Reason is thus decodified and opened to other senses, and in The Killing Joke what informs the new
sense of reason is madness.
The opening of reason and of thought to something other than logocentric codifications is clearly
evident when the Joker questions the manner in which man comes to understand and make sense
of the world. Caged and naked, Commissioner Gordon sits on the floor, leaning his head on his
knees to avoid the Jokers words:
How does it live, I hear you ask? How does this poor, pathetic specimen survive in todays
harsh and irrational world? The sad answer is not very well. Faced with the inescapable
fact that human existence is mad, random and pointless, one in eight of them crack up and
go slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this [] any other
response would be crazy!
(Moore et al. 2008: 33)
The Jokers adoption of a reason that is maddened is not unjustified or ungrounded. The passage
above explicitly indicates that the Jokers epistemological mode is one that responds to todays
harsh and irrational world, where randomness and pointlessness require more than the imposition
of order to make the world understandable and life worthwhile. The Jokers irony rhetorically
emphasizes his empathy for those who crack up, since the crazier response is not that of those who
go mad, but instead the response of those who remain rational. Yet, there is a difference between
reading the Jokers predilection for madness as a symptom or as a normatively rational discourse,
and reading it as liberating reason and as advancing a distinguished epistemological mode. This is
why it is crucial to conceptualize the Jokers relation to madness not through the institutional, legal
and medical registers of madness, nor through the analysis of his praise of madness as a denunciation of order within logocentric order.
If we adopt the first approach, we have to accept the codifications of madness provided by these
practices and discourses and thus see the Joker as a subject of madness, while if we adopt the second

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approach, the Jokers relation to madness remains oblique and negative, since he is praising madness
within logos: A new and radical praise of folly whose intentions cannot be admitted because the
praise [loge] of silence always takes place within logos, the language of objectification (Derrida 1978:
37). The Derridean alternative, while insightful in its critique of Foucaults history of the ensembles
that designate certain experiences of madness, is more problematic precisely because it obstructs the
Jokers relation to madness from being radical beyond logos. In this scenario the Jokers relation to
madness remains internal to an order that he himself questions when he suggests that we are not
contractually tied to rationality. The Jokers relation to madness is indeed one that objectifies and
prescribes folly, but its success derives precisely from the fact that the new sense he gives to reason
asks us to read beyond the contractual codes of logocentrism. It is not by accident that the Joker aims
specifically at Commissioner Gordons reason. The Jokers epistemological re-conceptualization of
reason is to be taught to the one who is most entrapped by the legal codes of Gothams police, the
man who protects the Jokers rights in Arkham and says to Batman, I want him brought in and I
want him brought in by the book! (Moore et al. 2008: 37). Here, Deleuzes description of means of
codification (laws, contracts, institutions) in Nomad Thought is useful. He says, with certain books
of law, specifically called codes, or even sacred texts, the readers relation is itself governed by a law
(Deleuze 1999: 142). Commissioner Gordons insistence that the Joker be arrested according to the
law illustrates his resistance towards the Jokers maddened reason and thus his normative and lawful
abidance to logocentric reason. If we follow Deleuzes approach to Nietzsche in Nomad Thought,
our relation to reason should not take place as a question of abiding by reasons presupposed logocentric rigidity, but of finding forces that can traverse reason so as to give it a wholly new sense.
Commissioner Gordon cannot free his reading of reason from logocentrisms codes whatever the
health or madness of him who propounds it, be it after seeing the pictures of his daughters crippling, be it in a state of undress In its most impoverished syntax, logos is reason (Derrida 1978: 54).
Most importantly, reason as codifying and being codified by the law. By the book you hear? We
have to show him! We have to show him that our way works (Moore et al. 2008: 37).
Ultimately, the Jokers way, the mad epistemology that allows him to cope with reality, does not
work for Commissioner Gordon. Whereas the success of the Jokers plan to teach the ways of
reasoning with madness is open to debate, the Jokers insubordination to the clauses of logocentric
reason persists. If Commissioner Gordon did not learn anything at the Jokers school of madness,
the Joker thinks he can still try one more time with Batman. Likewise, Batman believes he can
persuade the Joker to abandon his deviant life: we could work together. I could rehabilitate you
(Moore et al. 2008: 44). The Jokers reaction is a reiteration of his view that Its all a joke! (Moore et
al. 2008: 39). His response to Batmans offer is yet another joke, the killing joke that brings us back
to the lunatic asylum (Moore et al. 2008: 45). The Killing Joke thus stages two resilient modes of
thinking and living with reason. It stages the institutional, legal and psychiatric experiences and

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codes that apprehend madness to protect the social space of reason from what threatens it, and it
stages the obstacles of returning to the origin of the subjects madness and writing its history. The
Jokers maddened reason, though resilient because of his incessant laughter, is better understood
not as a result of his madness or as a praise of madness within the order of logos. The Killing Joke
presents a scenario where the opposition between reason and madness is confounded, and it is
through the very fall of such opposition that the Jokers character achieves the, some would say
impossible, task of letting reason be traversed by other senses. The question of how to approach the
origins of the void instituted between reason and madness remains, but the Jokers mode of knowing and approaching madness suggests that the exclusion of madness from reason is not essential,
bringing him closer to Foucaults thought than one would think. The problem the Joker poses for
thought is that of shattering the purity of reason to allow it to be traversed by forces and senses
beyond the orthodox regulation of logos. Perhaps we need to ask whether we can bear this new epistemological task can we see the funny side?

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Deneb Kozikoski Valereto

Moore, A., Bolland, B., Higgins, J. and Starkings, S. (2008), The Killing Joke, New York: DC Comics.
Rose, N. (1992), Of Madness Itself: Histoire de la Folie and the Object of Psychiatric History, in
A. Still and I. Velody (eds), Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucaults Histoire de la
Folie, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 14249.

Suggested citation
Valereto, D. K. (2011), Philosophy in the fairground: Thoughts on madness and madness in thought
in The Killing Joke, Studies in Comics 2: 1, pp. 6980, doi: 10.1386/stic.2.1.69_1

Contributor details
Deneb Kozikoski Valereto is completing her Research Masters in Literature at Leiden University,
the Netherlands. Her interests include twentieth-century continental philosophy and intersections
between philosophy and literature, especially in the works of Derrida and Deleuze. Her literary
interests include twentieth-century Latin American and German literature. Among her newly found
interests are Alan Moores graphic novels and literary visions of new modes of thinking the questions of ethics and justice.
E-mail: d.kozikoski.valereto@umail.leidenuniv.nl

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