The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Writing the history of madness means writing the history of the separation between reason and the various forms taken by its opposite, unreason. And, at the beginning of this inquiry, a fundamental ambiguity is evident: madness is something more than a merely historical product, as its structure escapes, at least in part, the historical process of modern civilization and constitutes its tragic and negative side. Another source of interest can be found in Foucault’s biography. During the 1950s, he had access to an internal point of observation on madness, since he studied and taught psychology and psychopathology, published several papers and a short introductory book on mental illness (FMMP), and worked in a laboratory of experimental psychology. For all of these reasons, madness plays a very important role in Foucault’s thought. For him, it is one important ield of relection on the relations between philosophical and historical work, a ield of relection about the practical origins of objects of knowledge, and it is a constant source of reinterpretation and new elaborations of his own research. Both an object constituted within history and the focal point for a tragic and Nietzschean philosophy of history, madness will become in the 1970s one of the main places for the emergence of the concept of the power/ knowledge apparatus.

There is a familiar description of the events that bring psychiatry into being as a positive science and as a legitimate therapeutic practice at the end of the eighteenth century. According to this account, at that time madness was inally recognized as mental illness, a scientiic discourse was constituted in order to know it, and a set of therapeutic practices gained the status of the application of a solid theory. Also, medical science is said to have brought with it a new philanthropic and humanistic attitude toward the mad, as symbolized by Pinel’s gesture – immortalized by Muller’s and Fleury’s nineteenth-century paintings – liberating the mad from chains at the Bicêtre hospital in 1793. With Pinel in France, Tuke in England, and Wagnitz and Reil in Germany, a style of positivistic thinking inally captured madness, described it as mental illness, and started to cure it. This is the standard account Foucault wants to destroy in his History of Madness, and for two main reasons. First, it presupposes that madness is a transhistorical object, whose identity would have inally been recognized by physicians as mental illness at the end of the eighteenth century. Mental illness is not the same thing as madness, or unreason, and we need to study what these things were in the centuries that preceded the constitution of a positive science of the mind. They were complex and global experiences rather than individuated and ixed objects. Second, the standard account of the history of psychiatry implies that a “liberation” of the mad occurred, thanks to a more precise knowledge of madness. But for Foucault we are “able to demonstrate the backdrop of social sensibility against which the medical consciousness of madness had begun to take shape” (EHM, 78–79). Madness is not immediately an object of knowledge and scientiic observation but the result of a historical, social, ethical, and political experience of the separation between reason and unreason. In

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Foucault’s words: “Our scientiic and medical knowledge of madness rests implicitly on the prior constitution of an ethical experience of Unreason” (EHM, 91). As Canguilhem brilliantly summarized, the “look [regard] of reason – cold, impartial, objective, or so it believes – is thus in fact secretly oriented by a distancing reaction.... In the history of civilization, fear has traced out the object of observation” (Canguilhem 1997, 24–25). Foucault wants to describe the historical experience of the separation between reason and unreason, which conditions the possibility of the constitution of scientiic knowledge. This experience, both collective and individual, places unreason at a distance and only then individuates a family of well-shaped and recognizable illnesses. In order to do so, Foucault concentrates on the classical age, but he also discusses the immediately previous and the immediately following periods. It is a history of structural changes and differences in social sensibilities and perceptions.

Although during the Renaissance all European hospitals had places for madmen, this remained a small-scale phenomenon. In the Renaissance, madness was visible and possessed a language to express itself. In the paintings of Bosch and Bruegel, in the words of Brandt and Erasmus, in theatre and literature, and inally in the masterpieces of Shakespeare and Cervantes, madness was a daily experience, and a very important one. Madness was a cosmological force, linked to the dark powers of the world, and the madman was the speaker of this negative world of unreason. Even in philosophical and literary works, the mad demonstrates the madness of every man and leads readers and spectators to the discovery of the impossibility of a human knowledge of the world.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, a sudden change takes place in Europe. Epitomized by Louis XIV’s royal decree of 1657, this is what Foucault calls the Great Coninement. The changing of the structure of social, political, and ethical experience of the mad led to a massive internment of fools in particular buildings, which were half prisons and half houses of correction. These buildings grouped these people together with other nonworking people. The world of coninement was now populated by madmen, victims of the infamous lettres de cachet, “the venereal, the debauched, the dissolute, blasphemers, homosexuals, alchemists and libertines” (EHM, 101). The separation of the mad from the society of reason had nothing to do with medicine, which during the classical age dealt only with abstract classiications, trying to mold itself according to the taxonomies of natural history. The models of the German Zuchthäuser, the English Workhouse, and the French Hôpital Général, institutions that aimed not at healing the insane but at excluding them, spread everywhere in Europe. But this exclusion also had some positive effects: it created a new social space of perception where the mad are reduced to silence, deprived of their own language; the mad of the classical age end up in a synthesis between an individual excluded and imprisoned by the law and a socially guilty human being. Secret kinships between the mad and all kinds of social, moral, political, and sexual deviants

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percolated, and these will become the object of the positive style of thinking about madness of the nineteenth century.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the uniform experience of unreason starts to lose its unity and self-evidence. A new structural transformation takes place owing to changes in the political and economical practices of government and assistance to the poor, political denunciations of the system’s arbitrary nature, and the lamentations of the other inmates, who started to complain that they had to be conined with the fools. The great enlightened reformers of the Revolution will ind only the mad in the coninement houses, which are the product of 150 years of separation and internment. At this point, the hospital becomes the asylum, a place of healing in itself, a huge therapeutic device, but once again medical knowledge has nothing to do with this space. It is the structural transformation of the experience of madness and of the internment that results in the asylum being a place of healing and scientiic observation, not the other way around. The “liberation” of the mad from physical constraints coincides with a new regime of moralization guided by the family order and religion (Tuke at Bethlem), as well as the building of a detailed system of judgments, punishments, and moral gratiications within the asylum (Pinel at Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière). Moreover, a renewal of the meaning of older means of treatment, a separation between “the physical” and “the moral,” begins to emerge. For example, whereas in the classical age cold showers were thought to treat at the same time the body and the soul, and their relations, now they are explicitly used to punish, to obtain confessions and recognition of one’s own fault – in other words, they are addressed to “the moral.” In a highly controversial passage of his historical account (for the most detailed critique, see Gauchet and Swain 1980), the famous “moral treatment” is presented by Foucault as nothing more than a means for a more subtle control of the behavior of the mentally ill, and is in no way a therapeutic practice that could be deduced from a coherent system of knowledge. In Foucault’s words, “The asylum of the positivist age, which Pinel is credited with having founded, is not a free domain of observation, diagnosis and therapeutics: it is a judicial space where people are accused, judged, and sentenced, from which they can only be freed by a translation of this judicial process into the depths of psychology, i.e. through repentance” (EHM, 503).

The structure of the experience of the asylum is shaped by the contrast between the madman’s silence and the physician’s gaze, the acts of recognition of their own madness that mad people necessarily had to perform, and the formation of the patient/ physician couple as the main character of the asylum. In this way, madness becomes the object of an emerging anthropology. Moreover, whereas in the classical age madness affected both the mind and the body in their unity, a new space now became open: that of the separation between the psychological and the organic, the spiritual and the biological, that characterizes mental medicine up to our day. Nineteenthcentury psychiatry is built on this anthropological turn that transformed madness

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into mental illness and slowly organized itself around the notions of the ill will and the instincts and less and less around that of an intellectual error, as Locke and the idéologues of the eighteenth century would have it (ECF-AB, 156–160). In the 1970s, Foucault will be more precise about the disciplinary constitution of human subjectivity and of the psyche itself through disciplinary techniques, but in order to do that he had to question some of the ideas he used to write The History of Madness.

Between the details and the intricacies of Foucault’s reined historical narrative, a tragic philosophy of madness is present in The History of Madness. As is clear from the 1961 preface, madness is for Foucault a sort of Kantian noumenon: we cannot know it in its “primitive purity,” but nonetheless its presence silently guides the history we are writing. At the same time, madness has a kind of permanent Nietszchean and tragic structure. There is a tension between a tragic and cosmic conscience of madness on the one hand and a critical, discursive, and anthropological one on the other. The separation between reason and unreason takes place in history, but at the same time it is a point of origin of our history. Only after the separation between reason and madness took place did we become able to recognize and manage that difference. Before that separation, reason and unreason, tragedy and critique, were bound together. Moreover, even if his book is the story of the triumph of reason, this silent background of unreason possesses a strange continuity and places itself in a “vertical dimension” (EHM, 67) with respect to history. It runs underneath history, ready to reemerge where positive science seems to triumph. In our world of science, unreason inds its way in the words and images of Nietzsche, Artaud, Roussel, Van Gogh, and Goya. Even if reduced to silence by scientiic discourse, madness can ind its own language, unintelligible to the language of reason. The opposition between madness and mental illness is to be understood as the opposition between a discourse grounded in the long historical process of internment and the essential language of unreason. Foucault states: “What is called ‘mental illness’ is simply alienated madness, alienated in the psychology it has itself made possible” (EMIP, 76). The ambiguity of Freud’s role in Foucault’s writings of the 1960s is to be placed here: Freud carried on the discourse that reason utters on madness and, at the same time, found a place for its original language. This is also one of the main reasons why Foucault was very interested in literature during the 1960s, because he found a singular afinity between literature and madness in what he used to call the “absence of work,” where “work” must be understood as the work of reason, history, and the positive consciousness of our civilization. In his words, “Madness neither manifests nor narrates the birth of a work ... ; it outlines an empty form from where this work comes ... ; this is the blind spot of the possibility of each to become the other.... [I]t is also the place from where the language of literature comes” (EAW, 548). Foucault himself wanted to ind a new language in order to capture that silence and to write the history of the experience of madness, not of psychiatry, medicine, or other discourses about it. As he wrote in the 1961

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preface, he wanted to write “the archaeology of that silence” (EHM, xxviii), but “once Foucault’s idea of archaeology had matured, it appears that an archaeology can only be of what is said” (Hacking 2006, xii).

The editorial story of the reeditions of History of Madness is eloquent. In the 1972 edition, the irst preface was eliminated and the word “Unreason” – capitalized, which is unusual for French books – canceled from the title (from the 1961 Folie et Déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique to the simple Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique). Starting from the end of the 1960s, Foucault began to explicitly criticize some of the conceptual tools he made use of in History of Madness. In 1969, he wrote that the concept of experience he used was too vague, and for that reason he left room for a subject, even if collective, of history, a subject that he wants now to completely dissolve: “Generally speaking, Madness and Civilization [that is, History of Madness] accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I would call an ‘experience,’ thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history” (EAK, 16, translation modiied). Concepts like “repression,” “alienation,” and “essence” – all unproblematically employed in History of Madness – were also eventually criticized and abandoned. Even more radically, Foucault strongly argued against any kind of exteriority, and a passage such as the following seems implicitly meant to contrast the tragic tendency of History of Madness:

It is an illusion to believe that madness ... speaks to us on the basis of an absolute exteriority. Nothing is more interior to our society, nothing is more interior to the effects of its power than the unhappiness of a madman.... We place the “mad” in the outside that is creativity or monstrosity. And yet, they are taken into the network; they are formed and function in the apparatuses of power. (FDE2a, 77)

Parallel to this demystiication of the madman, who is neither a hero nor a mere victim but a simple vector in the mechanism of power/knowledge, Foucault will lose interest in writing about literature after the 1960s. Thanks to the notion of a power/ knowledge apparatus, Foucault became able to recognize that every human phenomenon is radically historical and that outside of a speciic apparatus there are only other speciic apparatuses.The fundamental gap between medical knowledge and the practical treatment of madness that History of Madness identiied as a central feature of the classical age and interpreted within the global framework of the internment of unreason will be illed, in the 1970s, by speciic analysis of power relations and power/knowledge apparatuses. If treatment is separated from scientiic knowledge, this is because the madman is primarily a target of power relations and not because he is the repressed voice of an essential and tragic force called unreason.

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Literature

Psychiatry

Sigmund Freud

Friedrich Nietzsche

William Shakespeare

Suggested Reading

Artières, Philippe, Jean-François Bert, and Luca Paltrinieri, eds. 2011. Histoire de la folie de Michel Foucault, Regards critiques – 50 ans. Caen: PUC-IMEC.

Roudinesco, Elizabeth, ed. 1992. Penser la folie: Essais sur Michel Foucault. Paris: Galilée. Still, Arthur, and Irving Velody, eds. 1992. Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in

Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. London: Routledge.

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representation: what is can be represented in thought, and knowledge is simply the representation of reality in the form of ideas. The relationship between reality and its representation in thought – or in language – is simple and straightforward. When one proceeds carefully and avoids error (think of Descartes’ understanding of error in terms of the will getting in the way of the proper functioning of reason), reality will dictate itself to the attentive mind and will allow itself to be represented as it is in itself. Its order will be self-evident, and the task of the scientist or the philosopher is simply to lay out the appropriate grid or table (think of Linnaeus) that will accurately represent relations of identity and difference.

This model of the classical age – the age of rationalism and empiricism, the age of the rise of modern science – is not unfamiliar. But Foucault adds something to the model by noting a certain absence:

In Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or relection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the “representation in the form of a picture or table” – he is never to be found in that table himself. Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist. (EOT, 308, Foucault’s italics)

Man does not appear until the classical episteme begins to break down, which is to say Man appears with the emergence of a new episteme that arises after representation has become problematic. This, according to Foucault, was what Kant recognized in his Logic when he referred the “traditional trilogy of questions”– “What can I know?” “What must I do?” “What am I permitted to hope?” – to a fourth “ultimate one”: “Was ist der Mensch?” (“What is Man?”) (EOT, 341). Man, in other words, has now entered the table of knowledge; Man is a part of the grid insofar as “the identities of representation have ceased to express the order of beings completely and openly” (EOT, 303) but express, instead, how those beings are presented to Man’s experience (cf. EOT, 341). This, for Foucault, is the inevitable consequence of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. When Kant outlined the transcendental conditions of experience, he showed that Man inevitably intervened between reality and the representation of that reality as knowledge. Man thus puts a halt to the increasingly disorganized representations of the classical episteme and in so doing heralded the birth of the modern episteme, in which “anthropology as an analytic of man ...

became necessary at the moment when representation lost the power to determine, on its own and in a single movement, the interplay of its syntheses and analyses” (EOT, 340).

Just what is this igure Man, whose analysis stands at the foundation of the modern episteme? Foucault provides his answer in terms of “four constituent segments” (EOT, 337), each of which situates Man between two conlicting poles that form the

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basis of The Order of Things’ ninth chapter, “Man and His Doubles”: the analytic of initude, the transcendental and the empirical, the cogito and the unthought, and the retreat and return of the origin:

i.Man’s initude is, paradoxically, endless. It is ininite in the sense that it characterizes every aspect of his analysis: his body, which is limited; his language,which exceeds his ability to master; his labor,which is never suficient. According to Foucault, “At the foundation of all the empirical positivities, of everything that can indicate itself as a concrete limitation of man’s existence, we discover a initude – which ... is expressed not as a determination imposed upon man from outside ..., but as a fundamental initude which rests on nothing but its own existence as fact” (EOT, 315). This is not to say that initude did not exist in the classical episteme; of course it did. But there, initude was understood in terms of its other, the ininite. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, initude is discovered at the foundation of the empirical contents given to thought, rendering inite all acts of knowing and every concrete form of Man’s existence. Man, Foucault concludes, “is possible only as a iguration of initude” (EOT, 318).

ii.Within the analytic of initude, Man appears situated between the empirical and the transcendental, “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet” (EOT, 318). What this means is that with the beginning of the nineteenth century, all inquiry came to be understood as inquiry into the empirical contents given to experience, with the further understanding that what is given to experience is itself a function of the transcendental conditions that make experience possible. And what this means, of course, as Kant understood so well, is that all inquiry within the modern episteme would, at bottom, be inquiry into the question “What is Man?”

iii.From this follows directly the double of the cogito and the unthought: if Man “is that paradoxical igure in which the empirical contents of knowledge necessarily release, of themselves, the conditions that have made them possible, then man cannot posit himself in the immediate and sovereign transparency of the cogito” (EOT, 322). The modern cogito is not Descartes’ cogito, because the modern “I think” cannot think the conditions that make its thought possible. At the archaeological level, the unthought is not something that befalls

Man; it is Man’s “Other,” his twin, born not of him or in him but alongside him (EOT, 325).

iv.The inal constituent segment of Man is his relation to the origin. Whereas in the classical age the possibility of representation was predicated on the availability of the origin as a site to which one could return, the modern episteme can no longer conceive of such an origin. Instead, the origin has been historicized, which is to say that, in every approach to the origin, what Man