MathJax example

Disclaimer

Sparknote provided an excellent summary. It allows me to reflect on the book and understand the context of Michel Foucault’s masterpiece. This post is based on Sparknote.

Before I start, can I just say this is a very difficult book to read, maybe only second to Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution. I cannot say I grasp all Dr. Foucault’s intended arguments and ideas, I can merely say I finished the book.

Some thoughts

Michel Foucault examines the history of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800. It begins by describing end of leprosy in Europe and the emergence of madness as a replacement for leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages. The position of madness changed in the classical period. A “Great Confinement” occured. Madness was shut away from the world, along with a range of other social deviants. Foucault analyses the concept of delirium, which is a discourse that essentially defines madness. There were four key themes within the classical conception of madness: melancholia/mania and hysteria/hypochondria. They were located within medical and moral debates, and were eventually seen as mental diseases as time progressed. Cures and treatments for various aspects of madness emerged. For the first time, society attempted to cure and purify the madman. A shift occurred in the nineteenth century. Confinement was condemned and attempts were made to free the confined. Confinement was represented as an economic error as much as a humanitarian issue. The asylum replaced the house of confinement. In an asylum, the madman became a moral outcast, and his keepers tried to act upon his conscience and feelings of guilt

Quotes

“At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable.”

“Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well.”

“By a strange act of force, the classical age was to reduce to silence the madness whose voice the Renaissance had just liberated, but whose violence it had already tamed.”

“The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.”

“And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”

“Since the end of the nineteenth century, unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning flash of works such as those of Hoederlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud .”

” Throughout Europe, confinement had the same meaning, at least if we consider its origin. It constituted one of the answers the seventeenth century gave to an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages, unemployment, scarcity of coin.”

“Confinement hid away unreason, and betrayed the shame it aroused; but it explicitly drew attention to madness, pointed to it. If, in the case of unreason, the chief intention was to avoid scandal, in the case of madness that intention was to organize it.”

“Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them. With error, madness shares non-truth, and arbitrariness in affirmation or negation; from the dream, madness borrows the flow of images and the colorful presence of hallucinations. But while error is merely non-truth, while the dream neither affirms nor judges, madness fills the void of error with images, and links hallucinations by affirmation of the false. In a sense, it is thus plenitude, joining to the figures of night the powers of day, to the forms of fantasy the activity of the waking mind; it links the dark content with the forms of light.”

“However, there is a difference in nature between those techniques which consist in modifying the qualities common to body and soul, and those which consist in treating madness by discourse. In the first case, the technique is one of metaphors, at the level of a disease that is a deterioration of nature; in the second, the technique is one of language, at the level of a madness perceived as reason’s debate with itself.”

“In the classical period, it is futile to try to distinguish physical therapeutics from psychological medications, for the simple reason that psychology did not exist. When the consumption of bitters was prescribed, for example, it was not a question of physical treatment, since it was the soul as well as the body that was to be scoured; when the simple life of a laborer was prescribed for a melancholic, when the comedy of his delirium was acted out before him, this was not a psychological intervention, since the movement of the spirits in the nerves, the density of the humors were principally involved.”

“Hence an abyss yawns in the middle of confinement; a void which isolates madness, denounces it for being irreducible, unbearable to reason; madness now appears with what distinguishes it from all these confined forms as well. The presence of the mad appears as an injustice; but for others. The undifferentiated unity of unreason had been broken.”

“Everything was organized so that the madman would recognize himself in a world of judgment that enveloped him on all sides; he must know that he is watched, judged, and condemned; from transgression to punishment, the connection must be evident, as a guilt recognized by all.”

“The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness.”