Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026)
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What is the central premise of The Idiots and why does the author call the figure a “Homo Nullus”?
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Leonard Emmerling about his most recent book. Dr. Leonard Emmerling is an art historian who has directed cultural institutions across Germany and New Zealand. And his new book is called Idiots, the History of Hormone Knowledge, which does something quite spectacular. I haven't seen a book that does such a thing quite this way. It takes the word that we throw around as an insult and asks, what if the idiot is actually one of the most important figures in Western culture? Emmeline Trey says they eat it all the way back to ancient Greece. Someone was cut off from public life through medieval holy fools into Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and also to the artists and punks of the 20th century.
The book was being published by Chicago University Press just a few months ago. Leonard, welcome to New Books Network. Thanks for the invitation. Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself? and tell us how the idea of the book came to you. And I'm particularly interested in the scope of the book because you cover something around 2500 years of history from ancient Athens to today's newspaper headlines, and you trace the word idiot across all those years. Tell us a little bit about the inception of this book.
Okay, maybe
first about
myself. So I'm an artist. I studied art history in Germany and wrote my PhD about the art theory of Jean Dubuffet, the painter and collector and writer. And I used to work as a curator in Germany and you see a little bit before I joined the Bird Institute as a head of visual arts in Munich and then at different positions in New Delhi, Chicago, and now in Chennai. The book itself is probably a book about inspiration, which might be a little bit surprising when you think of the title. But it started with a... with a remark by Jean Dubuffet in his writings about the force maieutique du néant. This is in French. So the productive power of nothingness. and i always wondered what what he actually meant with that until i stumbled across the writings of uh nicolaus the coup's medieval philosopher and theologist who wrote in 1450 to publish two books uh yoda delmente and um uh
two books about the idiots, the laymen, and there was the story of the spoon carver. So the spoon carver sits at the gate of a city and claims that he can create something out of nothing. He doesn't need to know anything, he doesn't need the libraries, he doesn't need the teaching of His ancestors, he has access to what he called infinite knowledge, which is nothing else but having access to the knowledge of God directly without any intermediaries. And all of a sudden, these two stories collapsed with that remark by Dubuffet. And I had the idea of, oh, well, that's the story of the idiota, of the idiot, the guy who knows nothing. but creates something out of nothing and starts creating his own world or her own world.
And that's, of course, also the story of the Art Brut artist in Dubuffet's perspective. creates art without any predecessor, without making any reference to anything in the history of art or in what we know about the history of art. So this is why the subtitle, the Homo Nullus, kind of plays on two levels. It's on one hand, yeah, it's what medical literature, how medical literature of the 19th century described the couture or the idiot or the imbecile. It's in Homo Nullus. But it's also the... the level of nothingness from which something can emerge or something that can be
created. And when I read the book, I sort of kind of expected to hear all negative things about idiots, the history of all idiots, but your book quite changed my perspective. I think it's important to put it into perspective right at the beginning as well, because in the book, you were careful to draw a distinction. between, there are cases like, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, spoon carver, so it's idiota, like someone claims a kind of divine intuitive wisdom, and also the fool or the madman.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the central premise of The Idiots and why does the author call the figure a “Homo Nullus”?
0:01–8:06
2
How did Leonhard Emmerling’s personal background and a remark by Jean Dubuffet inspire the book’s concept?
8:06–39:28
3
What distinguishes the “idiot” from other outsider figures like holy fools or madmen in medieval and religious contexts?
39:28–54:26