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I   As soon as I sat down, I remembered the quote by Enrique Vila-Matas which in some way had brought me there: ‘the best thing to do is to travel and to lose theories, lose them all’ I had stumbled across it while reading Dublinesque, and a week later, there I was, sitting in the aeroplane that would take me to Geneva, trying to lose theories but always looking for them I was traveling to Switzerland convinced that a change of scenery would be providential in my quest to write an essay on the work of the Spanish writer I was leaving London in the hope that the land of the silent Robert Walser would be able to bring to life the series of mad ideas that previously had translated into heavy, tedious, infertile digressions More than to lose theories – I understand that now – I was making this journey in order to embody them I’d been drawn to Lausanne for years, that city on the banks of Lake Geneva where the artist Jean Dubuffet had established his fascinating collection of outsider art, or art brut, as he’d called it Guided by the idea that all worthy art has ‘a great deal to do with delirium’, and by his interest in the anti-cultural, marginal qualities of art, Dubuffet had started collecting, throughout the 1940s, art produced by those writing at the margins, outsiders who defied the rules of the academy ‘Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,’ he had said Recently I’d come to think that in these scrawls drawn obsessively in asylums or prisons, by psychiatric patients or criminals, the fleeting essence of every true avant-garde could be found Beyond the historical categories we had learned at school – beyond Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism or even Surrealism – I wanted to think of the avant-garde as an impulse, as a force that helped art reach the limit of obsession, and then take, as Maurice Blanchot had requested of it, the step where it ran the risk of madness and solitude