Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Madness and Civilization

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Madness and
Civilization A French philosopher, historian,
intellectual, critic and sociologist. He held a
chair at the College de France with the title
History of Systems of Thought, and also taught
at the University of California, Berkley. His
work on power and the relationship between power,
knowledge and discourse has been largely
discussed. In 1960s Foucault was often associated
with the structuralist movement. Though sometimes
characterised as post-structuralist and
post-modernist, Foucault rejected those labels.
Died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984 and was
the first high-profile French personality who was
reported to have AIDS.
Leper vagabonds and deranged minds
folly/madness Diseased body
deseased mind
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• The Narrenschiff is a literary composition,
  probably borrowed from the old Agronaut cycle
  acquiring an institutional aspect in the
  Burgundy Estates. these boats conveyed their
  insane cargo from town to town. (8)
• Apocalypse
• madness
• Death
• the mockery of madness replaces death and its
  solemnity. (15)

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• No doubt, madness has something to do with the
  strange paths of knowledge. The first canto of
  Brands poem is devoted to books and
  scholarsErasmus reserves a large place for
  scholars But if the knowledge is so important to
  madness, it is not because the latter can control
  the secrets of knowledge on the contrary,
  madness is the punishment of a disorderly and
  useless science. If madness is the truth of
  knowledge, it is because knowledge is absurd, and
  instead of addressing itself in the great book of
  experience, loses its way in the dust of books
  and in idle debate learning becomes madness
  through the very excess of false learning. (25)

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Another symbol of knowledge, the tree, once
planted in the heart of the earthly paradise, has
been uprooted and now forms the mast of the Ship
of Fools it is this tree, without a doubt, that
sways over Boschs painting. (22)
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Madness in Renaissance

• Not a vice, but a human weakness.
• New forms of madness develop
• Madness by romantic identification (Cervantes and
  his Don Quixote)
• Madness of vain presumption (present in all men
  to an extent)
• Madness of just punishment
• Madness of desperate passion (Ophelia and King
  Lear)

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Scarcely a century later after the career of the
mad ships, we note the appearance of the theme of
the Hospital of Madmen, the Madhouse
Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a
hospital (35)

• Reason vs. Unreason
• only by controlling the abnormal can the
  normal exist. (38)
• Madness was thus torn from that imaginary
  freedom which still allowed it to flourish on the
  Renaissance horizon in King Lear, in Don
  Quixote. But in a less than a half-century it had
  been sequestered and, in the fortress of
  confinement, bound to Reason, to the rules of
  morality and to their monotonous rights. (64)

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Madness and art

• Where there is no work of art there is no
  madness This is the new triumph of madness The
  world that tried to justify itself and measure
  madness through psychology must justify itself
  before madness. The world measures itself by the
  works of Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. But
  nothing assures the world that it is justified by
  madness, not even psychology. (288-289)

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Important themes in Madness and Civilization

• Relationship between madness and unreason
• Unreason is reason dazzled or confused during
  the period of confinement. In the modern period,
  however, unreason is pushed further beneath the
  surface of society, and is understandable only
  through certain artists madness on the other
  hand, becomes mental illness, and is treated and
  controlled by medical and psychiatric practices.
  Unreason is somehow lost after the eighteenth
  century.

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• 2. Construction of madness.
• Foucault insists that madness is not a natural,
  unchanging thing, but rather depends on the
  society in which it exists. Various cultural,
  intellectual and economic structures determine
  how madness is known and experienced within a
  given society. In this way, society constructs
  its own experience of madness. Ultimately,
  Foucault sees madness as being located in a
  certain cultural "space" within society the
  shape of this space, and its effects on the
  madman, depend on society itself.

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• 3. Madness and art
• His central argumet rests on the idea that modern
  medicine and psychiatry fail to listen to the
  voice of the mad, or to unreason they dont
  offers a chance of understanding unreason. To do
  this, we need to look to the work of "mad"
  authors such as Nietzsche, Nerval and Artaud.
  Unreason exists below the surface of modern
  society, only occasionally breaking through in
  such works. Madness is linked to creativity, but
  yet destroys the work of art. The work of art can
  reveal the presence of unreason, but yet unreason
  is the end of the work of art.

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