Meet the Marquis de Sade
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXV. Foucault - part 15
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders cont...
p110
...In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the sustained effort, in the name of enlightened psychiatry, to quarantine, cast out, and “confiscate” insanity has helped create a monstrous new “system of the transgressive.” Isolated and confined, the impulses called “mad” now boil and seethe as “the strange contradiction of human appetites” the complicity of desire and murder, of cruelty and the longing to suffer, of sovereignty and slavery, of insult and humiliation.” [I'm having a hard time finding a good definition of the way "sovereignty" is being used here. This is about the closest I've found.] As it has done eternally, “unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The nonbeing it once was now becomes the power to annihilate.” The shadowy truth and tragic promise of madness is now expressed in “the insane dialogue of love and death” -- a dialogue inaugurated by the Marquis de Sade.
"One could say, in an approximate manner,” explains Foucault, “that up until the Renaissance, the ethical world” -- and particularly those figures of madness who existed “beyond the division between Good and Evil” -- experienced a kind of “equilibrium” of “tragic unity, which was that of destiny or providence and the divine predilection.” But in the eighteenth century, this unity was shattered, almost beyond recall, “dissociated by the decisive division between reason and unreason. A crisis of the ethical world begins, which doubles the great conflict between Good and Evil by the irreconcilable conflict between reason and unreason.” Excommunicated, unreason comes to comprise “a field of experience doubtless too secret to be formulated in clear terms, too reproved as well. from the Renaissance to our own modern epoch. to have been permitted the right of expression.” No longer treated as a revelation of the world and its shadowy powers, linked instead to immorality on the one hand and the scientific understanding of mental illness on the other, madness becomes a “human fact,” associated with such specific social types as the pervert and the homosexual.
p111
In this account, Sade becomes a pivotal figure, embodying simultaneously the close of the Age of Reason and the dawn of our own modern era. Sade after all was a victim of the classical practice of confining the mad indiscriminately with criminals, prostitutes, delinquents, the poor. For much of his life, he was in prison, at first for raping and allegedly poisoning several young women, later for the crime of writing Justine and Juliette, works that gave evidence, officials declared, of “licentious insanity.” “It is no accident,” writes Foucault, “that sadism, as an individual phenomenon bearing the name of a man, was born of confinement and, within confinement, that Sade's entire work is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible Island, which thus form, as it were, the natural habitat of unreason.” That this habitat is, in fact, unnatural and historically contingent Foucault has already demonstrated: the image of the Ship of Fools, sailing the empty expanse of an untamed exteriority, offers the starkest possible contrast.
He has asserted this but has he really demonstrated or proved it?
At the same time, Sade, for Foucault, expresses a distinctly modern idea of “tragic experience,” thus blazing a path later followed by Friedrich Holderlin, Gerard de Nerval, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent Van Gogh, Raymond Roussel, and Antonin Artaud -- a philosopher, a painter, and four poets; three of whom committed suicide; all of whom, like Sade, were at some time in their lives officially declared “mad."
"After Sade,” contends Foucault, “unreason belongs to whatever is decisive, for the modern world, in every work; that is, in every work that admits of the murderous and coercive.” In contact with such works, “man communicates with what is deepest in himself, and most solitary,” rediscovering “the most internal, and at the same time the most savagely free of forces.” It is this enigmatic power that apparently erupts in the “limitless application of the right of death” in Sade. It figures as well in “the bold joy of life” Holderlin found in the death of his tragic hero Empedocles, [but see also here] who, fleeing “to Nature's heart,” “flung himself down into the glorious flames” of Mount Etna, It is perhaps the same dark force that surfaces in the suicidal delirium of Nerval's last night, in the black crows swirling in Van Gogh's last painting, in the murmuring “repetition of death” in Roussel's writing, in the shrieks and tortured sobs of Artaud's final appearance on stage in 1947. [No Nietzsche?]
p112
As this litany suggests, madness, in its modern apotheosis, contains all “the ambiguity of chaos and apocalypse.” For the fascination with cruelty, torture, and death is “a sign that Nature is lacerating herself, that she has reached the extreme point of her dissension.” Dreaming of the charred corpses littering Sade's premonition of Auschwitz -- or enjoying the “unspeakably pleasurable sensations” of dangling from a noose and watching life slip away -- Nature as it were reveals “a sovereignty which is both herself and something quite outside herself: the sovereignty of a mad heart that has attained, in its solitude, the limits of the world that wounds it, that turns it against itself and abolishes it at the moment when to have mastered it so well gives it the right to identify itself with that world.
Yeah...
...in the “insane dialogue between life and death,” Foucault discovers an untamed power of “total contestation,” a mad form of being that calls into question the very roots of modern culture: “Everything that morality, everything that a botched society, has stifled in man, revives in the castle of murders.”
An amazing claim -- so strange that few readers of Madness and Civilization have lingered over it, or tried to fathom its implications. [Speculation, though probably true] Perhaps it is fortunate that the hermetic style leaves shrouded in mystery just what Foucault has in mind. [Fortunate for who? Foucault? who fails to make whatever point he was trying to make?] As a figment of autobiographical allegory, on the other hand, Foucault’s proposition could not be more richly suggestive. For Sade of course speaks directly to the substance of Foucault’s own singular “madness” -- his unrelenting fascination with death. In an interview years later... Foucault spoke with rare candor about the origins and personal significance of Madness and Civilization. Like all of his books, it was, he confided, a means of “realizing direct, personal experiences.” “I had had a personal, complex, and direct relationship with madness,” he explained... “and also with death.”
p113
But the work, he goes on, referring explicitly to Blanchot, is itself meant to provoke, in the reader as it did in the writer, an “experience” in its own right, an experience that upsets our preconceptions, forcing us to see the world in a new light: “The book constituted for me -- and for those who read or used it -- a transformation in the relationship that we have with madness (as this is marked historically, theoretically, and also from an ethical point of view).”
The book’s message to historians is clear enough: after reading Madness and Civilization, it is impossible... to write a history of mental illness that assumes madness is a biological given. The book’s theoretical impact is equally obvious: it calls into question the scientific status not only of classical but also of modern psychiatry...
Miller is fond of ending sections, and not a few paragraphs, with rhetorical devices pushing the reader into the next paragraph or section. I have mostly ignored these devices since they mostly ask questions that are then answered, and it is the answer that is of interest. But I now realize, after reading the above paragraphs, that there is one question that he’s repeated that I shouldn’t have ignored. Here it is: “...one... imagines Foucault’s Nietzschean Demon posing again the curious question: ‘How did I become what I am and why do I suffer so from being what I am?’”
Foucault’s interest in “madness” is clearly not disinterested. He is plowing this particular intellectual field for personal reasons and bringing to this work a very unique perspective. I say this not to dismiss him, but to call attention to the value he brings to the subject because he is able to stand at a leverage point, remote to the average person. (That’s a reference to Archimedes, if I wasn’t clear enough). If I may invoke virtual-synaesthesia again, there is both a value and some qualifications that should go along with his analysis of madness. (The very careful prose of a synesthete who can taste words, might posses a certain charm for the normal reader, or it might just be vague, elliptical, or convoluted).
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