This paper attempts to provide a new way to understand of the life and work of radical intellectual Zhang Tai Yan (1869-1936) by rethinking “insanity” as both an experiential standpoint and an overlooked impetus for the development of revolutionary knowledge and affect. When giving a speech in Japan in 1906, Zhang Tai-yen used the unlikely term “shenjing bing” (literally nerve disease, but meaning insanity or, more colloquially, a person who is "psycho") to evoke the spirit of revolutionary knowledge and affect. This paper provides a preliminary study of the meanings of “shenjing bing” from the late 19th to early 20th century. The paper then reads Zhang as a “shenjing bing” in two ways, as a revolutionary and as a person with a “brain disease” (he was epileptic). Through this double reading, the paper attempts, first, to articulate (rather than avoid) the concrete, embodied experience of “shenjing bing.” Second, “shenjing bing” is explored as a discursive position, a speaking site where Zhang’s experiential, political and social groundings converge in an epistemological standpoint.