Neurosis and defense of the word in “Storia di una malattia” by Amelia Rosselli

Abstract

Storia di una malattia by Amelia Rosselli is a short text in which the narrator recounts the tortuous surveillance she allegedly suffers from the CIA. From the beginning, however, the reader warns of the persecutory mania that corrodes the narrator's mind. Delirium, encysted in his speech, articulates a problematic relationship between the true and the real. In this sense, the paranoid is misunderstood because his political arguments are interpreted as medical symptoms, and the permanent response of the system is hospitalizations and medi-cations. The torture of the CIA lies in a theft of voice, in an exhausting effect on the words of the narrator, who listens to repeat without stopping what she thinks. The text can then be read not only as an hallucinatory confession but also as a defense of the word, a safeguard imposed by the narrator on her own words.