Anjana Bala

Navigating psychiatric and post-psychiatric landscapes in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Ethics at the Rupture focuses on the ethical lives of individuals diagnosed with what psychiatry classifies as episodes of psychosis or schizophrenia. This manuscript challenges portrayals of madness as pure break, withdrawal, or an incommensurable state of being. Instead, it reveals madness as a fractured yet enduring site of ethical and philosophical life — a persistent orientation toward others, spaces, and futures, and a persistent search for a meaningful existence. Drawing upon 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2024) across psychiatric wards, rehabilitation homes, and art therapy centers, this work shows how individuals deemed mad strive to remain in relation: to family, to political and activist movements, to ecologies of human and non-human life. These commitments, however uncertain or fragile, are not bound by conventional notions of mutual aid or reciprocal care, but follow an intemporal ethical order and an arrhythmic mutuality — one that precedes reciprocity and resists a final closure. This manuscript demonstrates how such forms of living — life at the edges — not only challenge clinical framings of madness, but also open toward new horizons of ethical life, belonging, and forms of living at sites of rupture.