Abstract: The article aims to analyze the meaning and scope of references to Nerval's writings found in the work of Michel Foucault on the history of madness or on the links between madness and literature. This rather unique mobilization of the poet in a philosophical context leads us to recapture the transgressive power of nervalian writing in its resistance to the normative discourses of his contemporaries, to which Nerval opposes his singular - poetic reason, based on the concept of the double.
