Reception of Madness and Civilization
Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XXXIII. Foucault - part 13
From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders cont...
p103
...Foucault’s view in Madness and Civilization about the medical and biological aspects of madness as a type of physical disease are in fact surprisingly elusive. As Canguilhem [scholar appointed by the Sorbonne to clear the text for publication] sensed, the book is not really about mental illness at all -- it is, rather, about the philosophical value accorded to the lives, utterances, and works of artists and thinkers conventionally deemed “mad.”
In a 1964 essay, subsequently republished as an appendix to the French edition of 1972, Foucault went out of his way to make this point clearly. He sharply distinguishes “mental illness” from “madness,” calling them “two different configurations, which met and were confounded with each other from the seventeenth century on.” He concedes that mental illness “will undoubtedly enter an increasingly well-controlled technical field;” in modern hospitals like Sainte Anne, “Pharmacology has already transformed violent wards into huge and lukewarm fish tanks.” The philosophical problem of madness -- and of unreason -- will nevertheless persist: though modern medicine may rob insanity of its terrifying edge, madness, “that lyrical halo around the illness,” has already, thanks to surrealists and their fellow-travellers, from Raymond Roussel to Antonin Artaud, entered into a new kinship with literature, “far away from pathology.”
Not really clear on the distinction between insane and mad.
p104
...Canguilhem... urged Foucault to tone down his rhetoric and to drop certain passages that seemed to him too sweeping and peremptory, but the younger man had refused. Foucault was wed to the form of his work and would not change a word.
...As few works of history do, Madness and Civilization opened up a new perspective on the past. It provoked an outpouring of new research on the changing treatment of the insane. But the longer professional historians worked with the archival materials, the more doubts and reservations they registered about the accuracy of Foucault’s own account.
p105
...But if the book was not, appearances to the contrary, a conventional work of history -- what, then, was it?
In his original preface to Madness and Civilization, Foucault attempted, very obliquely, to address this question. The first in a projected series of historical inquiries into “limit-experience,” to be conducted “under the sun of the great Nietzschean quest,” the book, he explained, in a passage of almost impenetrable abstraction [Heidegger’s influence, I would guess], was an effort to rescue from oblivion an “undifferentiated experience,” an “experience, not yet divided, of division itself.” His book “is not a question of a history of knowledge,” he insists, but rather a history of “the rudimentary movements of an experience.”
I confess I am puzzled by whatever it is in French that is translated into English as "movement" or "movements." I first ran into this in The Elegance of the Hedgehog where Paloma was always talking about her "Journal of the Movement of the World."
The idea of “experience,” as Foucault used it here, owed more to Bataille than Kant. In the first volume of his Summa Atheologica, Bataille had defined the raptures of oneirism, madness, and eroticism as so many forms of ‘inner experience,” coining an incongruously bland term of art to describe a dimension of being human he envisioned in terms of violence and discord, dissociation and anguish, cruelty and chaos. Bataille treated such “inner experience” as a kind of atheist ecstasy, an unholy revelation of the human being in its unformed, Dionysian essence.
A society could of course seek to wall off and condemn the Dionysian aspects of being human. “The old master of drunkenness, of anarchy, of death forever revived,” as Foucault once described Dionysus, posed a genuine threat to civilized order. [Peeperkorn and music in The Magic Mountain] Still, no matter how strenuously a culture tried to outlaw the Dionysian impulse, it would only be fettered, never transcended” after all, Dionysus, in the Nietzschean view, symbolized the power of transcendence itself. As Foucault puts in in his preface, this power remained eternally accessible, just outside “the gates of time.”
A variety of different paths could lead to these gates. In dreams, writes Foucault, a man “could not be stopped from examining his own truth” in all of its raw daimonic purity; in eroticism, he could glimpse the “happy world of desire,” prior to its “tragic division” into normal and abnormal acts; and in moments of madness, he could confront, as we have seen, “the nothingness of existence” as the “déjà-là of death.”
p106
Madness, as Foucault defines it in his preface, is “the absence of work,” using “work” in Blanchot’s sense. Madness shatters the singular compound of form and chaos that permits the “work” to exist: words fail, silence descends; the human being experiences the void. About this pure experience of madness, nothing, by definition, can be said.
But at the limit of madness -- astride the line separating reason from unreason, balanced between the Dionysian and the Apollonian [has he been using this spelling -- instead of “Apollinian” -- all along? I hadn't noticed] -- the “rudimentary” experience of madness is not entirely inaccessible. By paying heed to “a very original and crude language, much more primordial than that of science,” the historian of madness might yet represent “those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax” in which an “exchange between madness and reason” sometimes occurs. [Like speaking in tongues (Glossolalia)?]
At such moments -- and Foucault thought they were preserved in some of the Western world’s greatest works of art -- something like “an original division” becomes visible. To restore the value of such an “inner experience” within the confines of a reasoned history of mental illness would be to demonstrate anew how “the man of madness and the man of reason,” though “moving apart, are not yet disjunct.”
Art and madness. Seeing beyond conventions to the ground of reality. This addresses my question of what makes art art. To really experience the phenomenological world, rather than to just accept it intellectually, would seem like madness. Link to Hedgehog on Consonance and Art.
That this task is difficult, Foucault concedes: “The perception that tries to seize” madness and unreason “in their unfettered state belongs necessarily to a world that has already captured them. The freedom of madness is only audible from high in the fortress where it has been taken prisoner.”
Still, Foucault insists, groans and shrieks from the dungeon are dimly audible. Guided by these distant voices -- and as Bataille reminds us, they are inner voices, as well as voices from the past -- the historian can survey not just the plays, poems, and paintings from the past, but also “notions, intuitions, juridical and police measures, scientific concepts,” listening for murmurs, looking for clues to what has been buried deep in the castle keep, searching for firsthand witnesses, however tortured, to an “experience, not yet divided, of division itself.”
By “division” is he talking about individuation? The separating of the individual from nature?
This evidence, as we have seen, Foucault finds: he discovers it, not in the lucid arguments of thinkers like Erasmus and Montaigne, but rather in the grotesque imagery of Bosch and in the insane outbursts of Artaud. “Thus reappears the lightning decision, heterogeneous to the time of history, but inconceivable outside of it, that separates the language of reason and the promises of time from the somber murmur of insects.” A typical touch, this passing reference to murmuring insects: one thinks [?] of the rebel angels Bosch depicted as a fearful plague of locusts raining down from heaven and infesting paradise with their diabolical promise of sin.
To interrogate a culture from the perspective of such a demonic fall is “to question it from the margins of history.” And to express this experience requires, not scholarship, and certainly not rational argument (which would rob limit-experience of its tragic power) but rather artistry -- the fury of a poet like Artaud, the monstrous imagination of a painter like Bosch: “It is necessary to strain one’s ears, bending down toward this muttering of the world, trying to perceive the many images that have never turned into poetry, so many phantasms that have never reached the colors of wakefulness.”
p107
...Writing in his original preface to Madness and Civilization... Foucault, though customarily oblique, is relatively honest. His approach, he admits, entails “a kind of relativism without recourse,” a “language without support.” And for “a rule of method,” he confides, “I have retained only one, that which is contained in a text of Char, where can be read as well a definition of the most urgent and reserved truth: ’I remove from things the illusion they produce to protect us, and left them the part that they grant us.’”
This and other references to Rene Char in the preface remind us of Foucault’s original “rule of method.” For at the outset of his Nietzschean quest, in 1953, he had discovered his daimon in the dream -- that form of “inner experience” which throws “into bright light the secret and hidden power at work in the most manifest forms of presence.”
Char, too, had sought to unriddle his daimon in the dream, which is not surprising: like so many of the other crucial influences on Foucault’s thought, from Bataille to Artaud, Char had begun his career as a member of the surrealist movement. During the 1930s, he had drifted away from Breton and his circle, becoming friends with Maurice Blanchot, who championed his poetry, as did Martin Heidegger...
Elliptical, hermetic, intensely personal, Char's prose and poetry Foucault committed to memory. Along with Nietzsche and Sade, Char seems to have been the writer he knew best...
...it was the climax of... [a prose poem by Char] that... [Foucault] cited at the end of the original preface to Madness and Civilization -- as if to underline the connection between his first major book and the "great Nietzschean quest," to "become what one is..."
"Pathetic companions who scarcely murmur," Char's prose poem concludes, "go to the extinguished lamp and give back the jewels. A new mystery sings in your bones. Develop your legitimate strangeness."
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