This dissertation offers a comparative literary analysis of contemporary autopathographies of madness in France and the United States, drawing on Mad Studies and care ethics. It develops the central concept of the The Third-Space of Madness, a hybrid narrative zone where madness is written both with and against psychiatric discourse, in a mode of active ambivalence grounded in mimicry, subversion, and the ironic reuse of clinical language. Within this third-space, the narrative sovereignty of the “mad” subject is reconfigured without romanticizing suffering or reducing it to diagnosis. The works studied (Suzanne Scanlon, Annie Cohen, Juliet Escoria, Emmanuel Carrère) divert the languages of care—diagnosis, protocols, charts, medications—to reveal their blind spots: stigma, loss of credibility, and pressure toward coherence and cure. Through fragments, lists, autofictional blurring, and counter-uses of clinical jargon, they disrupt testimonial linearity and negotiate between acknowledging clinical discourse and resisting its interpretive closures. Care ethics emerges as an attention to opacity, silence, and ruptures in readability: these texts invent practices of listening that refuse to translate everything into symptoms, shaping a “mad” ethics of care in which dignity depends on complexity. The comparative approach does not oppose national models but maps resonances and divergences in form and voice (DSM parody, pain, ambivalence, mimicry). The mad third-space thus constitutes the dissertation’s main contribution: a conceptual tool for reading works that oscillate between pathology and reappropriation, opening literature to a politics of attention.