Book Review Essay: “A Voice Without a Place” A Review of “Stella Do Patrocínio’s Falatório/Chatter”

Stella do Patrocínio: “Black Creole Negro” 

It’s said: you can’t be on the floor,

Because the place for the head is in the head

The place for the body is in the body,

On the walls you can’t either,

On the beds you won’t be able to be either,

In the empty space you won’t be able to be either,

Because the place for the head is in the head

The place for the body is in the body.

I’m Stella Patrocínio

Good patronage.

I’m sitting on a chair

A Black creole negro broad stuck at a table

I’m a Black creole negro broad

That’s what Ana told me.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 210-11)

The first time I heard the name Stella do Patrocínio, it was not in a book of poetry or in the pages of an academic article. It was in a bar, in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro, after one of the weekly meetings I attended in Méier, at the Oficina Experimental de Poesia (Experimental Poetry Workshop), alongside other poets in training.

As was common at the time, someone decided to recite a poem. A colleague from the workshop began to recite a passage that immediately caught me off guard. There was something raw in it, luminous and unsettling. Following the conclusion of the reading, the question of authorship was raised: who had written the text, and who was the poet? The answer was given without hesitation: Stella do Patrocínio. Then she showed me the book Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome (Kingdom of critters and animals is my name), organized by the Brazilian philosopher and poet Viviane Mosé.

That same night, I took the book with me. As soon as I arrived home, I read it in one breath, from beginning to end. I was deeply moved to learn that Do Patrocínio had spent much of her life confined in psychiatric institutions. Black and poor, she spent nearly thirty years of her life in Colônia Juliano Moreira. During the hospitalization Do Patrocínio spoke incessantly, her speech circulated within the hospital dismissed as logorrhea and largely used to reinforce her diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Do Patrocínio named her own speech falatório, translated in the book as chatter, a signifier that invites closer analysis and will be taken up more fully later in the text. Her falatório was first published as poetry (Do Patrocínio, 2001) and later became the subject of master’s and doctoral theses (Beber, 2021; Ramos, 2022); with the publication of Stella do Patrocínio: Falatório/Chatter by ICI Press, her work is gathered, contextualized, and brought into public circulation through a critical apparatus that builds on and extends these earlier engagements.

The volume organized by Iracema Dulley and Marlon Miguel proposes an explicitly ethical and political engagement with Do Patrocínio’s legacy. The book does not seek to close the narrative around Stella do Patrocínio; rather, it exposes the limits of any single framing and invites further inquiry into how such voices might be approached without either silencing them or fully assimilating them into established cultural categories. 

One of the elements that sets this publication apart is that it enables an encounter with Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório alongside her original audio recordings. To read the content of what Do Patrocínio says is to engage primarily with the signifying dimension of her discourse; to hear her speaking, however, is to be exposed to the voice as such, its timbre, rhythm, repetitions, hesitations, and tonal shifts. What is at stake, then, is not only what Do Patrocínio says, but what happens when her voice is heard. 

Listening introduces an affective crossing that cannot be reduced to meaning alone, one in which the listener is implicated by the force and intensity of Do Patrocínio’s vocal presence. Her voice carries lines of force that exceed interpretation, operating not merely as testimony but as an event that summons, unsettles, and establishes a singular bond. As Do Patrocínio herself affirmed, there was “an incarnated incarnation” in her (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 103), one that can be heard, rather than interpreted, through her voice. In this sense, the audio recordings do not simply supplement the written record; they radically transform the encounter with Do Patrocínio’s words, foregrounding the ethical and clinical stakes of listening to a voice that continues to act upon those who hear it.

Falatório/Chatter: On the Ethics of Listening

My real name is coffin, burial, cemetery, corpse, dead

body, human skeleton, nursing home, hospital for all kinds

of diseases, asylum, and world of critters and of animals.

The animals: dinosaur, camel, jaguar, tiger, lion, hmm…

dinosaur, monkeys and giraffes, turtles. Kingdom of crit-

ters and of animals, that’s my name.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 133)

The book Falatório/Chatter situates the reader within a sharply defined temporal and spatial context, anchoring Do Patrocínio’s existence in the historical landscape of twentieth-century Brazil and, more specifically, within the institutional space of the Colônia Juliano Moreira. From the outset, the narrative refuses to present Do Patrocínio as an abstract or decontextualized figure; instead, she appears as a subject produced at the intersection of time, place, and power. The reader is guided to understand how Do Patrocínio’s voice emerges from a context marked by confinement, surveillance, and social exclusion, where speech itself is regulated and frequently stripped of meaning. This becomes particularly evident in the historical characterization of psychiatric “colonies” as Brazilian examples of what Erving Goffman would later conceptualize as “total institutions” (Goffman, 1961, p.4). These were spaces designed to absorb those deemed socially undesirable, including “alcoholics, the ‘retarded’, delinquents, prostitutes, the destitute, indigents,” as well as women whose lives transgressed moral or patriarchal norms, such as those who became pregnant through rape or engaged in premarital sex (Do Patrocínio, 2025, pp. 3–4). This contextual framing is essential for grasping the political and ethical stakes of listening to Do Patrocínio’s falatório, a form of speech produced under conditions explicitly designed to neutralize it.

Methodologically, the book is grounded in the existing archival material related to Do Patrocínio, making the archive both its primary source and its central problem. Audio recordings, a single institutional document, and fragmented traces constitute the official corpus through which Do Patrocínio has been historically known. Rather than treating these materials as transparent repositories of truth, Falatório foregrounds their partiality, their silences, and their embedded violence. This archival logic is inseparable from what the book identifies as the “industry of madness”, a system marked by abusive disciplinary methods and structured around the reproduction of mental illness and its “chronification” through long-term hospitalization (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 4). The archive thus reveals not only what is recorded, but also the institutional mechanisms through which subjectivity is systematically eroded.

Beyond reproducing or citing archival records, Falatório/Chatter critically intervenes in them by offering analytical texts that interrogate the broader social and political structures sustaining Do Patrocínio’s institutionalization. A central axis of this critique is Brazilian institutional racism, articulated through a compelling analogy between enslaved populations and psychiatric patients at the Colônia Juliano Moreira. The asylum appears as a post-abolition space of racialized containment, where Black bodies deemed unproductive or disruptive are subjected to systematic dehumanization. This dynamic is reinforced by the economic logic underpinning psychiatric confinement: private hospitals received state funding for each hospitalized patient, transforming institutionalization into a lucrative business. As a result, extreme overcrowding became normalized. Around six hundred women were confined to the pavilion where Do Patrocínio lived, with rooms housing up to seventy institutionalized women and beds separated by a mere thirty centimeters (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 8). Through this analysis, Do Patrocínio’s case becomes a lens for examining the continuity of racial violence across different historical regimes.

The Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) functions in the book as a decisive temporal marker, framing Do Patrocínio’s life within a broader state project of disappearance and erasure. Psychiatric institutions are shown to operate in parallel with other repressive apparatuses of the regime, absorbing those whose existence challenged normative, economic, or moral orders. The spatial organization of the Colônia Juliano Moreira makes this continuity materially visible: new pavilions constructed to accommodate the growing number of institutionalized women stood alongside the original plantation structures, the casa grande, which housed the asylum’s administration until the 1960s, the senzala, and the church in the central square (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 8). In this sense, the asylum was literally grafted onto a colonial topology, reproducing within psychiatric confinement the same spatial and symbolic logic that had structured slavery. Like enslaved African people and their descendants forced to labour under brutal plantation conditions, the interns were deprived of freedom of movement and held in profoundly dehumanizing circumstances (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 8).

This historical continuity is further underscored by the bureaucratic practices of the dictatorship. Following the 1964 military coup, admission records ceased entirely, causing an entire generation of institutionalized youth to disappear into a bureaucratic void, an absence that the book insists should be read not as negligence, but as policy (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 16). Do Patrocínio’s own confinement reflects this regime of capture and command: she recounts being violently “grabbed” while walking on the street, then “ordered” to be taken, “ruled over”, and placed into an ambulance (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 11). Such language exposes the continuum between medical authority and state violence, revealing how institutional psychiatry functioned as a technology of governance.

The Brazilian anti-asylum movement thus arises as a pivotal condition for reconfiguring the ways in which Do Patrocínio’s speech can be heard. Emerging in the aftermath of the dictatorship, the movement began to articulate connections between the deep social and racial stratification of Brazilian society and the operation of psychiatric institutions, foregrounding what would now be recognized as institutional racism (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 18). Within this transformed epistemic landscape, Do Patrocínio’s falatório can be re-signified as meaningful rather than dismissed as symptomatic noise; defined as a form of speech not necessarily addressed to a specific interlocutor, often perceived as random, excessive, or chaotic, and therefore subject to derogation or dismissal (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 12). Falatório comes to be understood as a mode of expression shaped by structural silencing. Do Patrocínio herself articulates this internalized hesitation, describing a state in which her mind “gets confused,” leaving her uncertain whether she is speaking to her own conscience or to that of others (Do Patrocínio, 2025, pp. 13–14). Attending to this speech retroactively exposes the epistemic violence of a system that rendered her voice inaudible (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 14).

Importantly, Falatório/Chatter emphasizes that Do Patrocínio’s discourse cannot be fully apprehended through textual transcription alone. The audiovisual and photographic archives made accessible by ICI Berlin Press reveal the embodied dimension of her presence: gesture, posture, rhythm, pauses, and vocal modulation are not peripheral but central to meaning-making. 

Editorial and translational choices further reinforce this ethical stance: by rendering the text in standard written Portuguese while preserving features of oral Brazilian Portuguese, the editors resist exoticization and refuse to transform Do Patrocínio’s speech into a spectacle. This approach situates her language within a shared linguistic field, acknowledging her competence while countering the historical marginalization imposed upon her.

As stated explicitly, Falatório/Chatter does not seek to give Stella do Patrocínio a voice (she has always spoken), but rather to highlight the changing conditions of listening that allow her falatório to be heard from a different position. Through its archival montage, sensitivity to embodied performance, and editorial choices guided by an ethics of listening, the book renders her speech intelligible as testimony, revealing the patterns of insistence, rhythm, and presence inscribed in her discourse. In doing so, it confronts the institutional and social structures that have historically rendered her words inaudible, demonstrating how what was once dismissed as mere noise can be understood as a structured, performative, and poetically charged form of expression.

In what follows, a closer examination will be undertaken of several traces left by the book for the reader, particularly those that open conceptual and clinical pathways beyond its explicit arguments. Attention will be given to the space of madness as a site of production, to the voice as a locus that resists full symbolization and unsettles the limits of representation, and to the dynamics of social normalization that exceed and traverse individual diagnoses.

Grazing in Colônia Juliano Moreira

No, I don’t feel like doing anything else, just keep

grazing; graze, graze, graze, graze, grazing at will.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 47)

Long before I had ever heard the name Stella do Patrocínio, I had been in Colônia Juliano Moreira in search of another name: Arthur Bispo do Rosário. Like Do Patrocínio, Bispo do Rosário was black, poor, and diagnosed as schizophrenic, inhabiting the far margins of Colônia Juliano Moreira, the “end-of-the-line” psychiatric hospital to which those deemed incurable were sent. During his long confinement, Bispo do Rosário produced an extensive and singular body of work, later recognized and canonized as art, to the point that the museum inaugurated within the very grounds of the former psychiatric hospital would come to bear his name. Do Patrocínio’s work is less visible insofar as it cannot be easily transported like an object; it unfolds in speech itself, in a transient discourse that, if not recorded, exists only in the moment of its articulation.

Reaching Colônia already constitutes an experience of displacement. Located in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, the complex lies far from the city’s most urbanized areas, inaccessible by a direct route of public transportation. Along the way, a side of Rio de Janeiro rarely seen by outsiders emerges: unpaved roads, donkeys crossing the streets, riders on horseback, religious temples scattered through the landscape, and a territory largely controlled by militias.

Entering the institution’s grounds intensifies this sense of remoteness and removal. To reach Atelier Gaia, a community-based “art and care workshop” located in the Colônia Juliano Moreira, one must follow a long path through vegetation, pass through a tunnel, and cross a sequence of thresholds before arriving at a modest building, partially hidden from view. As Michel Foucault reminds us, institutions do not merely house practices of care or control; they produce them through space (Foucault, 2013). The architecture itself stages a passage, from visibility to obscurity, from circulation to enclosure. What appears as a site of psychiatric care thus operates as a dispositif of exclusion, in which distance, silence, and displacement are not incidental effects but fundamental techniques of institutional power.

During my visit, my attention was drawn to the ways in which, in the wake of Brazilian psychiatric reform, the former asylum had been reconfigured into a space where art is mobilized as a tool for social integration. The creation of the Bispo do Rosário Museum and Atelier Gaia appeared as a gesture at once fragile and ambitious: an attempt to re-signify a site historically marked by segregation. Conversations with several residents working on their artistic projects revealed a significant shift in the logic of confinement. Most of them now spend only part of their time within the psychiatric hospital, circulating through Atelier Gaia during the day and returning home afterward. By 2017, the year of my visits, a profound transformation had already taken place when compared to the time of Arthur Bispo do Rosário and Stella do Patrocínio, for whom confinement was total, uninterrupted, and lifelong.

A Voice Without a Place: What Escapes Symbolization

They… those working with phalanx, little phalanx,

terminal phalanx. Those working with active, middle, re-

flexive voice, really reflecting on what they are saying.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 59)

To better understand the significance of Stella do Patrocínio’s work and the role of her voice in shaping how it is apprehended, this discussion engages Jacques Lacan’s elaboration of the voice as a psychoanalytic object. Drawing on Lacan’s Seminar X: Anxiety (1962–1963), the voice is displaced from the field of communication to that of the drive, being situated as one of the modalities of the object a. As such, the voice is not reducible to speech nor to the semantic content of what is said. It designates what remains once signification has been established: an irreducible remainder produced by the operation of the signifier itself, one that directly affects the body. The voice thus appears not as a vehicle of meaning, but as an excess that escapes symbolization and insists at the level of jouissance.

It is at this point that the voice becomes decisive for thinking in terms of the relation to the Other. Rather than operating through comprehension, the voice acts through affectation. Anguish arises precisely when the object a, here, the voice, appears without the mediation of the signifier, that is, when it is no longer veiled by meaning. In such moments, the subject is exposed to a jouissance that cannot be fully symbolized or integrated, revealing the structural insufficiency of the symbolic order to contain what it itself produces as remainder.

From this perspective, the voice must be understood as a paradoxical locus: it both founds the bond with the Other and threatens to disorganize it. Lacan (1962–1963) situates the voice within the field of invocation, as that which calls the subject into a place within the discourse of the Other. Yet this call depends on a sufficiently stabilizing symbolic mediation. When such mediation falters, invocation gives way to intrusion. The voice no longer addresses the subject – it imposes itself. It is precisely at this threshold, between call and invasion, that the voice reveals itself as object a: not an object that can be possessed or mastered, but one that irrupts, unsettling the subject and often precipitating anguish.

Didier Anzieu’s notion of the sound envelope, articulated with the concept of the Skin-Ego, offers an insightful complement to this Lacanian framework. For Anzieu, the voice, particularly that of the primordial Other, initially functions as a psychic envelope, providing continuity between body and language, and sustaining the cohesion of the ego (ANZIEU, 1992). The sound envelope contains, supports, and organizes the emerging subject. When this envelope fails, whether through excess, violence, or discontinuity, the voice ceases to function as a containing surface and becomes instead a source of invasion. No longer organizing the bond, it exposes the subject to fragmentation and anguish.

The articulation between Lacan and Anzieu thus allows us to think of the voice not merely as an isolated drive-object, but as a fundamental operator of the social bond. The voice inscribes the subject in the field of the Other prior to fully constituted signifying speech. It precedes meaning and, for that very reason, leaves enduring marks. When Lacan asserts that anguish is not without an object, he points precisely to this kind of object, one that resists capture by knowledge and naming. The voice, as object a, occupies the interval between body and language; between the possibility of relation and its potential collapse.

In Do Patrocínio’s case, what persists is not primarily a written oeuvre or a stable institutional archive, but the voice itself. Timbre, intonation, repetitions, cuts, and vocal singularities constitute a particular trace that exceeds biographical narration. Do Patrocínio’s voice cannot be reduced to a vehicle of discourse; it functions as a site of inscription of a possible, yet unstable, bond with those who listen. It summons, affects, and disturbs. While it draws the listener closer, it simultaneously exposes them to a resonance in which meaning never fully closes.

Do Patrocínio’s voice offers a vivid instantiation of the theoretical dynamics discussed above. The singularity of her vocal expression manifests precisely the paradoxical qualities of the voice as object a: it both summons and unsettles the listener, establishing a tenuous bond while simultaneously revealing its instability. In listening to Do Patrocínio, we witness the effects of the voice at the threshold between call and intrusion, where the subject is confronted with an irruption of affect that resists conventional symbolization.

Yet it is crucial to clarify that what is “unsymbolizable” in Do Patrocínio’s case is not her voice in itself. Her speech is structured, coherent, and critically incisive, engaging with social realities and challenging established norms. Rather than indicating a problem in her speech itself, the difficulty lies in the social position from which she speaks: a position for which no clear place is available within dominant systems of meaning and recognition. What listeners often experience as excess, confusion, or disorganization does not stem from a lack of coherence on her part, but from the limits of the interpretive frameworks through which her words are received. In other words, her discourse exceeds what prevailing cultural and institutional norms are prepared to hear.

From a Lacanian perspective, this tension helps explain how the voice emerges not simply as a vehicle of meaning, but as something that disrupts established forms of understanding. The unsettling quality of her voice is shaped by a social gap: certain subjects are prevented from occupying a fully legitimate place in public discourse, and their speech is therefore more likely to be perceived as noise, disturbance, or excess. The irruption of the voice, then, is inseparable from the social conditions that govern who can be heard, how, and on what terms.

Seen in this light, Do Patrocínio’s voice exemplifies the emergence of the object a as a remainder produced not only by the operation of the signifier, but also by the social field’s inability to provide a place for certain forms of speech. The living remainder of her voice persists as an affective trace, enabling encounters that are at once compelling and unsettling. It is within this interplay between vocal expression and social positionality that the object a reveals itself: something that cannot be fully captured by interpretation or assimilated by knowledge, yet insists as a site of affective and relational resonance.

A Place Without a Voice: When the State Occupies the Place of the Other

 I’m not of the house, I’m not of the family, I’m not of

the world, I’m not of any heads or any bodies; I’m not of

the world, I’m not of the family, I’m not of the house, I’m

not of any of the heads or any of the bodies; I’m not of air,

of empty space, of time and of gases. One walks in the air,

in empty space, in time, and in gases, like air, empty space

and time and gases; not in human form, human matter, and

heavy human flesh.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 115)

The detailed accounts in Falatório/Chatter allow us to reconstruct the circumstances of Stella do Patrocínio’s institutionalization. According to the records and testimonies collected by the editors, Do Patrocínio was apprehended by the police while in public, after a minor episode in which she was visibly distressed: a man struck her, causing her bag to fall, and she began to cry. A bystander intervened, calling attention to the scene, and the police arrived, taking Do Patrocínio to the psychiatric hospital. This account emphasizes that her confinement was a coercive intervention by authorities whose primary mandate was social order rather than public health. The procedural violence of this capture (the intrusion of police into the city streets, the absence of medical evaluation in the moment of apprehension, the immediate transfer to a restrictive institutional setting) exemplifies how the State’s apparatus can function as a mechanism of forced normalization.

Inside Colônia Juliano Moreira, Do Patrocínio experienced strict regulation of her daily life: mandatory medication, confinement, limited social interaction restricted to other involuntarily institutionalized individuals and application of electroconvulsive therapy. The social and symbolic rupture created by these conditions cannot be understood simply in terms of clinical treatment; it represents a structural intervention into the continuity of her social and psychic life. The removal from her community, the enforced routines, and the controlled environment together curtailed her agency, mediating all her interactions and constraining the channels through which her subjectivity could emerge.

As a critical extension of the book’s arguments, a comparison with Maura Lopes Cançado, a contemporary Brazilian woman, white and from a middle-class background, highlights the social stratification inherent in psychiatric care. Lopes Cançado also identified moments of psychic distress and voluntarily sought institutional care; her admissions were located in clinics closer to the city center, and she retained the right to leave at will. Lopes Cançado documented her experiences in diaries and literary works, consciously reflecting on her internal states and the effects of institutionalization. Unlike Do Patrocínio, her social position allowed her to exercise agency within the psychiatric system, to have her voice registered and interpreted as meaningful expression rather than merely as symptom. This contrast underscores how race and class, articulated through unequal forms of institutional access, structured both the experience of psychiatric care and the legibility of a subject’s voice in Brazil under the military dictatorship, when authoritarian power operated through both political repression and everyday institutional practices.

The juxtaposition of these cases suggests that psychiatric institutions are not neutral spaces of treatment. They can function as instruments of social regulation, where certain bodies are constrained, classified, and disciplined. Do Patrocínio’s life within the hospital illustrates how the State, acting through its institutions, can occupy the place of the Other: it imposes norms, structures interaction, and enforces a symbolic order that substitutes for the individual’s own social and relational networks. In such a setting, the distinction between treatment and control collapses; the hospital becomes a site where the conditions of symbolic and social recognition are actively suspended.

The reduction of Do Patrocínio’s speech to logorrhea further exemplifies this dynamic. What might be recognized as insight, philosophical reflection, or poetic expression in one context is transformed into a symptom within the context of forced institutionalization. Her words, stripped of contextual meaning, are classified, regulated, and ultimately silenced as they circulate only insofar as they conform to the psychiatric paradigm. This structural foreclosure mirrors the broader operations of the State and the psychiatric discourse: it does not simply suppress deviance, but defines the parameters of intelligibility and value, delineating the borders of what counts as a legitimate voice or thought.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the effects of such a setting extend into the psychic fabric. The deprivation of social ties, the isolation from relational networks, and the imposition of external norms can generate or intensify disorganization of the psyche. The asylum, therefore, is not merely a container of psychosis; it becomes a space in which psychosis can be produced or exacerbated by the systemic removal of symbolic anchors. In this sense, institutionalization functions as both a social and psychic intervention, shaping the contours of subjectivity through enforced norms and exclusion.

The presence of Maura Lopes Cançado as a point of comparison also emphasizes the contingency of recognition: it is not only the production of madness that shapes subjectivity, but the mediation of whose voice is heard, documented, and validated. Do Patrocínio’s speech reached broader audiences primarily through intermediaries who occupied positions of social and cultural authority (white, middle-class, and external to the institution). This asymmetry reveals the intersectional structures that determine which subjects are permitted to have their voices legitimized and which remain confined within the category of the abnormal.

These conditions raise questions about the relationship between the State and psychic life. When the State apparatus assumes, in a totalizing manner, the function of the Other, imposing norms without dialogue, it weakens the symbolic framework that supports the already-formed subjectivity of the individual. In the Brazilian context, this framework is further shaped by institutionalized racism, which permeates social structures and conditions the very possibilities of subject formation. Psychosis thus ceases to be merely a diagnostic matter and instead reflects the consequences of systemic exclusion, racialized marginalization, and the systematic removal of the symbolic context that allows the subject to sustain itself.

The case of Do Patrocínio invites reflection on the political, ethical, and psychoanalytic stakes of psychiatric confinement. Can radical institutional exclusion precipitate psychic disorganization? Can the State, through mechanisms of control and social regulation, produce forms of madness by isolating individuals from the social and symbolic orders? The ethical inquiry shifts from the assessment of mental illness to the critique of institutional power: it asks not how the subject has deviated from the norm, but how the operation of the norm, and the institutions enforcing it, acts upon the subject to redefine, constrain, or even annihilate psychic life.

The State and the Production of the Normal

…because only

beauty wins over beauty, only health wins over health, only

another normal wins over normal, only another scientist…

wins over a scientist.

(Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 133)

The concept of the norm, as elaborated by Georges Canguilhem, illuminates the mechanisms by which social and political institutions categorize and control bodies. For Canguilhem, a norm derives its authority precisely through the existence of what does not comply (the anti-value, the deviation, the abnormal). The normal is both the extension and the manifestation of the norm; it serves to straighten, rectify, and regulate, imposing order upon a diverse and resistant reality (Canguilhem, 2009, p. 113). In this sense, norms are never neutral: they express preferences, repudiate alternatives, and produce their own objects of exclusion. Seen through this lens, the institutionalization of individuals labeled as mentally ill is not merely therapeutic; it is normative, actively creating and sustaining what society recognizes as normal by separating and isolating what it considers abnormal.

This dynamic is vividly illustrated in Machado de Assis’s 1882 short story O alienista (The Psychiatrist), where Simão Bacamarte, obsessed with diagnosing madness, ends up institutionalizing nearly the entire town. Bacamarte does not merely observe preexisting disorder; he produces it, defining normality through exclusion. The story’s irony lies in its inversion: if one grants a single figure the authority to define normality, then normality itself becomes unattainable, ultimately, everyone is abnormal. Machado critiques the arbitrariness of social norms and the dangers of absolute authority, showing that the exercise of power creates both the categories and the subjects it claims to measure.

Just as the term “normal” migrated in the nineteenth century from pedagogical and sanitary institutions into broader society, establishing prototypes for health and education, so too did psychiatric institutions enforce standards of normality through exclusion. Do Patrocínio’s voice, behavior and, body became sites upon which the collective “will to normalize” was exercised, through medical classification, hospitalization, medication, and juridical authority. The asylum functioned as a normative apparatus: the abnormal was identified, isolated, and disciplined, and the norm gained authority precisely from what it excluded. Her falatório, like Bacamarte’s patients, demonstrates how institutions produce the abnormal to sustain the normal, highlighting the political and ethical stakes of psychiatric confinement.

In the Brazilian context, this production of abnormality intersects with broader social hierarchies. During the military dictatorship, psychiatric institutions functioned as instruments of social hygiene, absorbing those deemed inconvenient to the State: the poor, the black, the politically undesirable, and those whose existence defied normative intelligibility. Do Patrocínio’s confinement also reveals the racialized dimension of this process. The systematic internment of Black bodies, often without documentation or legal accountability, suspended lives outside historical narration, leaving gaps in records and treatment histories. This absence is not incidental; it is a structural feature of a system that did not recognize the full personhood of its subjects.

Do Patrocínio spoke insistently and with remarkable conceptual density. In her own words: “I let out excessively, accessively, I opened up too much, I talked too much, I said all I had to say. I stated, explained, clarified all.” (Do Patrocínio, 2025, p. 71). The question, once again, is not whether she could speak, but whether her speech could be heard as meaningful within the dominant symbolic order. In this sense, the term falatório emerges from a highly specific positionality, as if Do Patrocínio were acutely aware of the very place from which she was permitted to speak: a falatório (chatter) from the sanatório (sanatorium). What the sanatorium authorizes as its product is neither discourse, nor poetry, nor thought, but falatório, a category that reduces speech to noise, excess, and semantic waste. Yet in naming her own speech in this way, Do Patrocínio performs a subtle reversal. Through a logic akin to free association, she captures the institutional gaze and turns it into a signifier, exposing how her words are already anticipated as meaningless before they are heard.

This operation is consistent with other moments in her speech, such as when she refers to herself as bem patrocinada (well sponsored), playing on her own surname, Patrocínio, or when she says she needed to be bem domesticada (well domesticated) to be a doméstica (maid). Like in poetry, here again, language bends into wordplay, inscribing the subject where discourse would otherwise erase her. The name imposed by the social order is neither passively assumed nor rejected; it is worked through, displaced, made to resonate otherwise. Do Patrocínio’s speech might not seek recognition within the regime of meaning, but insists at the level of the signifier. The pun, the rhyme, the phonetic drift are not ornaments of style; they are the very means by which the subject marks her presence within a discourse that otherwise forecloses her.

Final Considerations

Taken together, the analyses mobilized throughout this review (historical, institutional, psychoanalytic, and political) aim not to exhaust Falatório/Chatter, but to follow the lines of force it activates. The book offers neither a definitive interpretation of Stella do Patrocínio’s speech nor a reconciliatory narrative capable of integrating her voice seamlessly into existing regimes of meaning. Instead, it opens a space in which listening itself becomes the issue: a practice shaped by power, history, and social stratification. By situating Do Patrocínio’s falatório at the intersection of archival erasure, racialized confinement, and normative regulation, the volume enables a reading that shifts the question from what her speech means to how, and under what conditions, it can be heard.

It is precisely here that Falatório/Chatter makes its most significant contribution. Through a rigorous engagement with the archive, the inclusion of audio recordings, and editorial decisions guided by an ethics of listening, the book reconfigures the relation between voice, testimony, and intelligibility. Rather than aestheticizing Do Patrocínio’s speech or extracting it from its conditions of production, the editors insist on maintaining the tension between speech and its historical silencing. This tension resists both psychiatric reduction and literary domestication, allowing her falatório to appear not as raw material to be interpreted, but as a performative force that continues to act upon those who listen.

In this sense, Falatório/Chatter exceeds the scope of a critical edition or historical reconstruction. It intervenes in broader debates on madness, race, institutional power, and the politics of voice, while also posing an implicit challenge to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the humanities at large: how to listen without neutralizing, how to transmit without appropriating, and how to sustain a voice that does not seek assimilation into the symbolic order as it stands. Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório persists not as noise to be corrected nor as poetry to be canonized, but as an insistence, one that demands, above all, a transformation in the conditions of listening.