The Body the Institution Cannot Hold: Caravaggio, Turing, and the Structural Law of Institutional Mythologisation

This monograph develops a unified theoretical framework within the Equilibrium Ledger Research Programme for understanding the institutional processing of cognitively divergent individuals whose output exceeds what surrounding institutional systems can stably accommodate. Through a sustained parallel analysis of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Alan Mathison Turing, the work argues that institutions repeatedly engage in a recurring structural cycle composed of extraction, administrative destruction, and posthumous mythologisation. The book introduces the Institutional Mythologisation Cycle as a formal theoretical mechanism and argues that labels such as “rebel”, “criminal”, “difficult”, “non compliant”, or “vexatious” frequently function not as neutral descriptions, but as administrative instruments used to convert structural incompatibility into personal pathology. The work situates itself in dialogue with Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Kuhn, Sara Ahmed, standpoint epistemology, disability theory, and institutional theory, while extending beyond those frameworks through the architecture of the Equilibrium Ledger Research Programme.