Summary

Foucault writes a history of civilization’s ever-changing relationship to madness. Starting inquires around the Renaissance, he tracks how madmen were once considered to be bearers of knowledge, although unintelligible from the edge of experience. His central thesis was that there once was a language that connected reason to unreason, and through various shifts in culture that dialogue has been cut off. The Renaissance gave way to the “Age of Reason” that signaled the beginning of the shift towards confinement. This separation eventually created a new category, the “insane”. This category objectified and concretized madness as both a thing to be studied, and something undesirable to be cured. From here the rest as they say is history, all sorts of treatments and testing were tried to cure and restore sanity.

Thoughts

At times Foucault’s writing was beautiful:

Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déjà là of death. But it is also its vanquished presence, evaded in those everyday signs which, announcing that death reigns already, indicate that its prey will be a sorry prize indeed. What death unmasks was never more than a mask; to discover the grin of the skeleton, one need only lift off something that was neither beauty nor truth, but only a plaster and tinsel face. From the vain mask to the corpse, the same smile persists. But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.

but a common thing I would run into is people quickly stating that they were not “an expert on Foucault”, I think this might be because of paragraphs like this:

The fulfillment of delirium’s non-being in being is able to suppress it as non-being itself; and this by the pure mechanism of its internal contradiction—a mechanism that is both a play on words and a play of illusion, games of language and of the image; the delirium, in effect, is suppressed as non-being since it becomes a perceived form of being; but since the being of delirium is entirely in its non-being, it is suppressed as delirium. And its confirmation in theatrical fantasy restores it to a truth which, by holding it captive in reality, drives it out of reality itself, and makes it disappear in the non-delirious discourse of reason.

I think I read that paragraph around ten times… I think I understand what it means, but I will be the first to tell you I am not an expert on Foucault. He had an idea that madness replaced leprosy in society, I found this really interesting. He bases this on the fact that for reasons unknown leprosy vanished from Western world in the 1400s. There were all these buildings (lazar houses) of separation to house the sick and it was these very buildings that would be refitted to house the poor, indigent, and insane. He captures a feeling towards lepers at the time in this pithy quote:

in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out. The sinner who abandons the leper at his door opens his way to heaven.

I am not sorry that I read this book, but I did not enjoy reading it. It was difficult and I think wrong in some of its conclusions, or probably what is more likely, I just didn’t correctly understand the point he was trying to make. I would like to read more from him, but I will definitely be taking a break. Perhaps I will have an easier time consuming his work after I’ve read more. For now I will end this review with one more quote that stuck with me in reference to Durer’s Horseman. https://collectionapi.metmuseum.org/api/collection/v1/iiif/336215/766795/main-image

…these are no angels of triumph and reconciliation; these are no heralds of serene justice, but the disheveled warriors of a mad vengeance. The world sinks into universal Fury. Victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s: it belongs to Madness.

Michel Foucault

#book

  • #madness_and_civilization
  • #michel_foucault
  • #history_of_insanity
  • #age_of_reason
  • #cultural_shifts
  • #insane_category
  • #mental_health_treatment
  • #renaissance
  • #language_of_unreason
  • #madness_in_society
  • #leprosy_and_madness
  • #philosophical_analysis
  • #literary_critique
  • #durers_horseman
  • #theoretical_explorations
  • #cultural_analysis
  • #vintage_books
  • #foucaults_thesis
  • #madness_as_knowledge
  • #mental_health_history