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This essay argues that in the novel Delirio (2004), by Colombian writer Laura Restrepo (1950), that which is delirious is the social body itself, rather than the individual character of Agustina or her psyche. To this end three ideas are elaborated: the secret as something visible, or common sense; the moral blindness of the novel's characters as a selfimposed impotence, and confinement as a social strategy of subjugation. The article uses literary pragmatics to propose an immanent reading of the novel, that is one which understands delirium from within delirium itself. Simultaneously, this reading recovers Nietzsche's typology of the slave in order to describe the novel's characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]