Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault

• Madness and Civilisation

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Periodisation of Madness

• 1. Stultifera Navis or Ship of Fools (15-16th
  Centuries)
• 2. The Great Confinement (17-18th centuries)
• 3. The Birth of the Asylum (late 18th-21st
  centuries)

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• Ship of Fools
• The Ship of Fools is not about other people, it
  is about us.

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Ship of Fools

• Madness circulates, was part of common decor and
  language, a daily experience that one seeks to
  exalt rather than master'.

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Erasmus In Praise of Folly

• the mind of man is so framed that it is rather
  taken with the false colours than truth of which
  if anyone has a mind to make the experiment, let
  him go to church and hear sermons, in which if
  there be anything serious delivered, the audience
  is either asleep, yawning, or weary of it but if
  the preacher--pardon my mistake, I would have
  said declaimer--as too often it happens, falls
  into an old wives' story, they're presently
  awake, prick up their ears and gape after it.

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Age of Confinement / Age of Reason

• In France Hôpitale Générale
• in Germany Zuchthausen
• in Holland Rasphuis
• In England Houses of Correction

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Age of Confinement or Age of Reason

• Exclusion
• Animality
• Heterogeneity
• Labour
• Spectacle

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Age of Confinement

• The animal in man no longer has any value as the
  sign of a beyond it has become madness without
  relation to anything but itself.

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Age of Reason

• Bourgeois normative order
• Labour and Idleness
• Human and the inhuman
• Reason and unreason
• Man and animal

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Bethlem or Bedlam
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Age of Confinement

• no longer men whose minds had wandered, but
  beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy
• In the reduction to animality, madness finds
  both its truth and its cure

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Age of Confinement

• Madness was no longer talkative and manifest. It
  enters a silence from which it will not emerge.
  It is stripped of its language and if one could
  continue to speak of it, it would be impossible
  for it to speak of itself.

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Birth of the Asylum

• Legend of Pinel and Tuke
• Liberation and Liberty

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Pinel Releasing Lunatics
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Pinel Releasing Lunatics
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Pinels moral treatment
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Pinels moral treatment

• The problem is to impose a morality that will
  prevail from within upon those who are strangers
  to it Silence (the guilt is shifted inside)...
  Recognition (self-imprisonment), Perpetual
  Judgment (recognition of guilt)

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The meaning of reform

• We must re-evaluate the meanings assigned to the
  liberation of the insane, abolition of
  constraint, constitution of a human milieu
  these are only justifications. In fact Tuke
  created an asylum where he substituted for the
  free terror of madness the stifling anguish of
  responsibility (Foucault)

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Age of Positivism

• The mad were turned into objects of the keeper's
  gaze, subjected to a system of rewards and
  punishments for the detail of their behaviour.
  The keeper was to be no longer a flogger of
  animals, but a moral authority and judge. The
  inmate was like a child handed over to the steady
  gaze of the man of reason. This moral system of
  power, based on an objectifying observation,
  denied validity to the voice of the mad.