MICHEL FOUCAULT PROJECT – PART II

MICHEL FOUCAULT PROJECT – PART II

Dr. Ram Sharma

Dr. Archana Durgesh 

In a rare personal disclosure, Michel Foucault once stated to an interviewer that he had been ‘pursued since childhood by a nightmare in which a text is part before his eyes, a text he cannot read, or of which he can only decipher a small part.’ (1)

This paper is concerned with presenting Foucault’s efforts, as they appear in his writings from 1954-66, to arrive at the type of thinking that is demanded if they text of our age’s experience is to be deciphered. We seek to record the steps he took, the false paths he explored, the threshold at which he arrived in his attempt to understand. The intellectual journey of these years was not an easy one: although Foucault was trained in psychology, madness was to have the last word; while he was attracted by phenomenology, the nonapparent was to provide itself decisive; in this search for man, the seriousness of the anthropology question disintegrated: desirous of enhancing freedom, he came to testify to necessary structure within which it is enclosed; a partisan of the scientific, the allies himself in the end with literature. It was a different journey but a far from fruitless one, placing him as it did at the threshold of a unique style of thinking, a new way of expressing and achieving freedom.

In the original preface, dated ‘Hamburg, 5 February 1960’, Foucault wrote that the book was begun ‘in Swedish night’ and completed in the ‘great, stubborn sunlight of Polish freedom’, and he often claimed that most of the work was done in Uppsala, but his footnote tell a slightly different story. The text was actually written in exile, but much of the research work was obviously carried out in Paris, partly in manuscript and printed books departments of the Bibliothèque Nationale, partly in Archives Nationales and partly in the Bibliothèque de l’ Arsenal in the rue de Sully. Foucault also relied to some extent on Sáint-Anne Library facilities, as he confirms in the privately printed brochure written to support his candidature to the collège de France:

‘In Madness and Civilization, I wished to determine what could be known about mental illness in a given epoch … An object took shape for me; the knowledge invested in complex systems of institutions. And  a method become imperative: rather than perusing … only the library of scientific books, it was necessary to consult a body of archives comprising decrees, rules, hospital and prison registers, and acts of jurisprudence. It was in the Arsenal or the Archieves Nationales that I undertook the analysis of a knowledge whose visible body is neither scientific nor theoretical discourse, nor literature, but a daily and regulated practice.’ (2)

A long love affair with the achieves had commenced, and it began with a lengthy sojourn in the “some-what dusty archives of pain.’ (3)

It is, perhaps, the preface to the first edition of Historie de la folie, sadly truncated in the abridged version of 1964 and replaced by a new preface in later editions, that provides the clearest insight into what is about his first book. It opens abruptly with a quotations from Pascal: ‘Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.’ (4)

Foucault’s history is a history of that further ‘mad twist’, ‘whereby men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neihbours, and communicate and recognize one another in the pitiless language of non-folly’, an attempt to ‘rediscover the moment of that exorcism, before it was definitely established in the realm of truth, before it was revived by the lyricism of protest.’ The concepts of psychopathology will be of no help in the search for ‘the degree zero of the history of madness; a phrase in which it is tempting to see a playful allusion to the title it is Barthes’s Degré Zéro l’ écriture, in which the term ‘writing zero degree’ refers to the flatly natural style of Camus’s L’étranger. It is not the categories of vosography that will guide Foucault. On the contrary, it is necessary to grasp something much more primal: ‘Constitutive, the gesture that divides madness, and not the science established once the gesture has been made, once calm has returned. Primal, the Caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason.’ (5)

The Preface goes on:

In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicate with the madman; on the one hand, there is the man of reason, who delegates madness to the doctor, thus authorising a relationship through the abstract universality of illness alone; on the other, there is the man of madness who communicates with the other only through the intermediary of an equally abstract reason, namely order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the demand for conformity. There is no such thing as a common language. Or rather, there is no longer such a thing, the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, takes formal note that a dialogue has been broken off, assumes that the separation has already been made, and plunges into oblivion all those imperfect words, somewhat stammered and with no fixed syntax, in which the exchange between madness and reason once took place. The language of psychiatry, which is reason’s monologue on madness, could only be established on the basis of such a silence. (6)

Foucault’s ambition is to write, not the history of a language, but the archeology of a silence. His history will be one of limits, ‘of the obscure gesture, necessarily forgotten as soon as they have been made, which a culture rejects something which will become its outside.’ (7) It is also an attempt to capture something else:

The space, at once empty and populated, of all these words without a language which allow the person who lends an ear to hear a ruffled noise from below history, the stubborn murmuring of the language which seems to speak quite by itself, without a speaking subject and without an interlocutor, huddled in on itself, a lump in its throat, breaking down before it has achieved any formulation and lapsing back without any fuss into the silence from which it was never separated. (8)

Madness and Civilization (1961) is a study of the prehistory and early history of psychiatry. The model of structuralist ethnology is noticeable in the means of analyzing discourse and in the methodical instantiation from one’s own culture. The subtitle already rays claim to a critique of reason: The history of Madness in the Age of Reason. Foucault wants to show the phenomenon of madness has been constituted as a mental illness since the end of the eighteenth century. With this goal in mind, he reconstruct the history of the rise of the discourse in which psychiatrists of the nineteenth an twentieth centuries talk about madness. What makes this book more than a wide ranging study a cultural history by a historian of science is a philosophical interest in madness as a phenomenon complementary to reason. A reason that has monological holds madness at arm’s length from itself so as safely to gain mastery of it as an object cleansed of rational sub-jectinity. Making madness clinical, which first renders mental illness a medieval phenomenon is analysed by Foucault as an example of those traces Betaille had read the history of western rationality.

In Foucault’s hands, the history of science is enlarged into a history of reason because it studied the constituting of madness as a reflex image of the constituting of reason. Foucault declares pragmatically that he wants “to write the history of the boundaries … by which a culture reprobates something that his outside it.” (9) He classifies insanity among those limit experience in which western logos sees itself, with extreme ambivalence, forced with something heterogeneous. Boundary-transgressing experience include contauct without even immersion in the oriental world (Schopenhauer); rediscovery of the tragic elements and of the archaic in general (Nietzsche); penetration of the dream sphere (Freud) and of the archaic prohibitions (Bataille); even the exoticism nourished by anthropological reports. Foucault omits Romanticism from this list aside from one mention of Hölderlin.

And yet in Madness and Civilization a Romantic motif comes through that Foucault will later give up. Just as Bataille discovers in the paradigmatic experience of ecstatic self-bounding and orgiastic self-dissolution the eruption of heterogeneous forces into the homogeneous world of an everybody life that has been compulsively normalized, so Foucault suspects that behind the psychiatrically //////// phenomenon of mental illness, and indeed behind the various masks of madness at that time, there is something authentic whose sealed mouth need only be opened up: “ One would have to bend an attentive ear to the whispers of the world and try to perceive the many images that have never been set down in poetry and the many fantasies that have never reached the colors proper to the waking state.” (10)

Foucault recognizes immediately the paradoxicalness of the task of catching the truth of madness “as it bubbles up long before it gets apprehended by erudition,” for “the act of perception that tries to apprehend these words in their unfettered state necessarily belongs to a world that already it in its grip.” (11) Nonetheless, the author sticks has in mind an analysis of discourse that, in the manner of depth hermeneutics, probes its way back to the original point of the initial branching off of madness from reason in order to decipher what is unspoken in what is said.

This intention points in the direction of the negative dialectics that tries to break out of the enchanted circle of identifying thought by means of such thought itself, that pursues the history of the rise of instrumental reason back to the point of the primordial usurpation and of the split of a monadically hardening reason from mimesis, and then circles round this point, even if only in an aporetic fashion. But Foucault would have to clamber about archeologically among the debris of an objective reason that had been destroyed, from the mute testimony of which we might still retrospectively shape the perspectivè of a (long since revoked) hope for reconciliation.

One who desires to unmask nothing but the naked image of a subject-centered reason cannot abandon himself to the dreams that befall this reason in its “anthropological slumber.” Three years later, in the foreword to The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault calls himself to order. In the future, he will abstain from dealing with texts through commentary and give up all hermeneutics, no matter how deeply it may penetrate below the surface of the text. He no longer seeks madness itself behind discourse about madness, or the mute contact of body with eyes, which seemed to precede any discourse, behind the archeology of the medical gaze.

In Madness and Civilization, Foucault investigates the peculiar connection between discourses and practices. It is not a matter of the familial attempt to explain the internally reconstructed evolution of science from conditions external to science. In place of the internal perspective of a problem-oriented theory of an institution; and then, at the close of the eighteenth century, the transformation of these places of incarceration and asylums  into closed institution with supervision by doctors for medically diagnosed mental-illness-that is, the birth of the kind of psychiatric establishments that still exists today (and the dismantling of which is promoted by the antipsychiatry movement).

These two events (first, the involuntary confinement of the mad, the criminal, those without housing, liberations, the poor, and the eccentric of every kind, and later on, the erection of clinics for the treatment of mentally ill patients) signal two types of practices. Both serve to delimit heterogeneous elements out of that gradually stabilized monologue that the subject, raised in the end to the status of universal human reason, holds with itself through making everything around it into an object. As in later studies, the comparison of the classical age with the modern age is central. Both types of exclusionary practices agree in forcing a separation and in rigorously erasing from the picture of madness, those traits that are similar to reason. It is just that the indiscriminate confinement of every deviant only means a spatial segmentation of the wild and the fantastic, which are left to themselves, it does not yet mean a domesticating compontation with a chaos that give rise to anxiety and that has to be integrated into the order of nature and of humanity as suffering and pathology: “ What the classical period had confined was not only an abstract unreason which mingled madmen and libertines, invalids, and criminals, nut also an enormous reservoir of the fantastic, a dormant world of monsters supposedly engulfed in the darkness of Hieronymus Bosch which had spewed them forth.” (12)

“… from the end of the Middle Ages, still bore witness to the now forgotten relation between the confinement of madman  and the exclusion of lepers, also received in the last years of the eighteenth century a sudden reinterpretation. What had once marked, here the entire violent, pathetic separation of the world of madmen from the world of mean, now conveyed the idyllic values of a rediscovered unity of unreason and nature. This village had once signified that madmen were confined, and that therefore the man of reason was protected from them; now it manifested that the madman was liberated, and that, in this liberty which put him on a level with the laws of nature, he was reconciled with the man of reason.” (13)

Foucault gives an impressive description of an asylum that underwent profound changes in visage and function, under the eyes, so to speak, of the psychiatrists, in the waning days of the eighteenth century: “this village had once signified that madmen were confined, and therefore the man of reason was protected from them; how it manifested that the [separated] madman was liberated, and that, in this liberty which put him on the level with the laws of reason, he was reconciled with the man of reason … without anything at the institution having really changed, the meaning of exclusion and of confinement begins to alter, it slowly assumes positive values, and the neutral, empty, noctural space in which unreason was formerly restored to its nothingness begins to be peopled by a [medically controlled] nature of which madness, liberated, is obliged to submit [as pathology]’.

Here, I would like to touch on a further theme that Foucault will pursue with ever grater intensity: the constitutive connection between the human sciences and the practices of supervisory isolation. The birth of the psychiatric institution and of the clinic in general is exemplary for a form of disciplining that Foucault will describe later on purely and simply as the modern technology of domination. The archetype of the closed institution, which Foucault initially discovers in the clinically transformed world of the asylum, turns up again in the forms of the factory, the prison, the barracks, the school, and the military academy. In these total institutions, which extinguish the quasi-natural differentiations of old European life and elevate the exceptional case of interment into a kind of normal forms of  “boarding’, Foucault perceives the monuments to victory of a regulatory reason that no longer subjugates only madness, but also the needs and desires of the individual organism as well as the social body of an entire population.

A gaze that objectifies and examines, that takes things apart analytically, that monitors and penetrates everything, gains a power that is structurally formative for these institutions. It is the gaze of the rational subject who had lost all merely intuitive bonds with his environment and torn down all the bridges built up of inter-subjective agreement, and for whom in his monological isolation, other subject are only accessible as the objects of nonparticipant observation. This gaze is, as it were, architecturally congealed in the Panoption   sketched out by Bentham.

The methodological problem of how a history of the constellations of reason and madness can be written at all, if the labor of the historian must in turn move about within the horizon of reason, remained just as unexplained in the early works as that of the relationship between discourses and practices. In the Prefaces to his studies published at the start of the 1960’s. Foucault poses himself this question without answering it, how ever, when he delivers his inaugural lecture at the college de France in 1970, it seems to have been solved in the meantime. Drawing a boundary between reason and madness turns up again here as one of the three mechanism of exclusion in virtue of which rational speech is constituted. The elimination of madness stands midway between the more conspicuous operations of keeping refractory speakers away from discourse, suppressions, and so on, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the altogether inconspicuous operation of distinguishing within the interaction of discourse between valid and invalid statements. Foucault concedes that at first glance it is implausible to conceive that rules for the eliminations of false statement on the model of delimitations of false statement on the model of delimitation of madness and the proscription of the heterogeneous: “How could one reasonably compare the constraints of the truth with those other divisions, arbitrary in origin if not developing out of historical contingency in a state of continual flux, supported by a system of institutions imposing them and manipulating them, acting not without constraint, nor without an element, at least, of violence.” (14)

Foucault does not write a history of madness, sickness, crime or sex, but a history of how it ever came to be taken for granted, in a whole range of contexts, that abnormalities are kinds of mental disease, that sickness is only the dysfunctions of an individual anatomy, that there exists criminal personality – types it is best to look up, or that there is something called sex residing inside each of us as a dangerous truth that must be exposed. He writes histories of “pseudo-objects”; he uses history to dispel the sort of routine, instituted self assurance people have about the reality they fear they may be suffering from, or the inner sexual needs they believe they have to release. In questioning this reality, Foucault’s histories are nationalist.

One /////// hand, Historie de la folie (Madness and Civilization) is a positive history of the transition from ‘folie’ to ‘mental illness.’ ‘folie’ is a difficult term to translate, since it encompasses both ‘folie’ and ‘madness’; in French, Erasmus praises ‘folie’, and both Lady Macbeth and King hear fall prey to it. On the other, it is an attempt to listen sympathetically to ‘the great lyrical protest which one finds in poetry since Nerval and Artaud … an attempt to restore to the experience of madness a depth and a power to reveal which were reduced to nothing by confinement’. In the years tht followed the publication of Historie de la folie, Foucault was to devote a great deal of effort to tracing and deciphering that experience and its literary expression, rather as thought he detected some primal relationship between writing and madness.

The text itself opens in a dramatic fashion and reveals the way in which Foucault has now acquired a style marked by the use of arresting initial images pr declarations: “At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the western world.” (15) In a deuse and rapid survey replete with reference to an extraordinary sometimes forbidding variety of sources. Foucault describes the disappearance of leprosy from Europe and the transference of all the fears and fantasies once inspired by the leper on to a new object. As the lazar houses  empty, a new object appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance: the ship of Fools, the Narrenschiff that drifted slowly along the rivers of the Rhineland and the canals of Handers with its symbolic cargo of madness. Whereas the Middle Ages had been haunted by the fear of death from plague or war, the Renaissance attempted to exorcise of new fear: fear of madness, no longer seen as an external threat, but as a possibility inherent in human experience. Folly haunts the work of men, turning thought to decision reducing all human endeavour to variety. The overall structure of dear remained the same; men still feared “the nothingness of existence, but that nothingness is no longer recognized as an external and final term, at once a threat and a conclusion; it is experienced from within, as the continuous and constant form of existence.” (16) Folly outdoes wisdom in Erasmus, denying the existence of any dividing line between reason and unreason, and mocks of reason in many a painting. Folly can even be a higher form of wisdom: Lear understands more in his madness than in his regal sanity, and the Fool is always wiser than Lear. Folly has not yet been totally excluded from the world; it speaks – and often speaks the truth – in Shakespeare and in Carvantes. The muffled sound of its voice had yet to be silenced. The individual madman, present in the everybody life of the Middle Ages, is isolated from the world, but his status has yet to be medically defined; he is the object of a particular solicitude and even hospitality.

Folly was silenced and exiled by the ‘great confinement’ of the seventeenth century. It was confined that now provided the most visible structure of the experience of madness. A decree of 1656 allowed for the foundation of Paris’s Hôpital Général, which had a mission to house the poor, the indegent, the sick, curable, and incurable, the mad and the sane, vagrants, mendicants and ‘libertines’. The great confinement was not primarily concerned with the insane as such. The Hôpital Général and the workhouses, Bridewells and houses of correction of England were all part of the police system, and Foucault uses ‘police’ in what he claims to be in original sense of all those measures which make work both necessary and possible for all those who cannot live without working. Establishing at the same time as the great manufactures, with their barrack-room discipline, they were in part a response to the economic crisis of the seventeenth century, a way of regimenting labour. They were also a product of an epistemological shift exemplified by Descartes’s Méditations métaphysiques, published in Latin in 1641 and in French in 1647: “while man can still be mad, thought, being the exercise of the sovereignty of a subject who makes in his duty to perceive the truth, cannot be insensate. A dividing line is traced, and will soon render impossible the experience – so familiar to the Renaissance – of an unreasonable Reason and a reasonable Unreason.” (17) The combination of epistemology and police ensures that “madness is perceived in terms of an ethical condemnations of idleness.” (18)

“Confinement was not initially a first, crude attempt to hospitalise madness but, rather, the likening of the mad to all those who came within the remit of a reason which confined all that it deemed to be unreason.” (19) The decision to confine a given individual may have taken on medical grounds; the practical definition of unreason was constructed by legal, social or can theological discourse. Folly or madness is not a natural phenomenon defined once and for all. It is a shifting constellation which can be displaced. It is, however, always the object of a consciousness which denounce it in the name of an assumed rationality.

The legends to Prival and Tuke transmit mythical values, which nineteenth century phychiatry would accept as obvious in nature. But beneath the myths themselves, there was an operation, or rather a series of operations, which silently organized the world of the asylum, the methods of cure, and at the same time the concrete experience of madness.

Samuel Tuke’s Retreat served as an instrument of segregation: a moral and religious segregation which sought to reconstruct around madness a milieu as much as possible like that of the community of Quakers. And this for two reasons: first, the sight of evil is for every sensitive soul the cause of suffering, the origin of all those strong and outward passions such as horror, hate, and disgust which engender or perpetuate madness: “It was thought, very justly, that the indiscriminate mixture, which must occur in large public establishments, of persons of opposite religious sentiments and practices; of the profligate and the virtuous; the profane and the serious, was calculated to check the progress of returning reason, and to fix, still deeper, the melancholy and misanthropic train of ideas.” (20)  But the principal reason lies else where it is that religion can play the double role of nature and of rule, since it has assumed the depth of nature in ancestral habit, in education, in everyday exercise, and since it is at the same time a constant principle of coercion. It is both spontaneity and constraint, and to this degree it control the only forces that can, in reason’s eclipse, counterbalance the measureless violence of madness, its precepts, “ where these have been strongly imbued in early life … become little less than principles of our nature; and their restraining power is frequently felt, even under the delirious excitement of insanity. To encourage the influence of religious principles ever the mind of the insane is considered of great consequence, as a means of cure.” (21)

“The principal of fear, which is rarely decreased by insanity, is considered as of great importance in the management of the patients.” (22) Fear appears as an essential pressure in the asylum. Already an ancient figures, no doubt, if we think of the terrors of confinement. But these terrors surrounded madness from the outside, marking the boundary of reason and unreason, and enjoying a double power: over the violence of fury in order to contain it, and over reason itself to hold it at a distance; such fear was entirely on the surface. The fear instituted at the Retreat is of great depth; it passes between reason and madness like a mediation, like an evocation of a common nature they still share, and by which it could link them together. The terror that once reigned was the most visible sign of the alienation of madness in the classical period; fear was now endowed with a power of desalienation, which permitted it to restore a primitive complicity between the madman and the man of reason. It reestablished a solidarity between them. Now madness would never cause – fear again; it would be afraid without recourse or return, thus entirely in the hands of the pedagogy of good sense, of truth, and of morality.

Samuel Tuke tells how he received at the Retreat a maniac young and prodigiously strong, whose seizures caused panic in those around him and even among his guards. When he entered the Retreat he was loaded with chains; he wore handcuffs; his clothes were attached by ropes. He had no sooner arrived than all his shackles were removed, and he was permitted to dive with the keepers, his agitation immediately erased; “his attention appeared to be arrested by his new situation.” He was taken to his room, the keeper explained that the entire house was organized in terms of the greatest liberty and the greatest comfort for all, and he would not be subject to any constraint so long as he did nothing against the rules of the house or the general principles of human morality for his part, the keeper declared he had no desire to use the means of coercion at his disposal. “The maniac was sensible of the kindness of his treatment. He promised to restrain himself.” He sometimes still raged, shouted, and frightened his companions. The keeper reminded him of the threats and promises of the first day; if he did not control himself, it would be necessary to go back to the old ways. The patient’s agitation would then increase for a while, and then rapidly decline “He would listen with attention to the persuasions and arguments of his friendly visitor. After such conversations the patients was generally better for some days or a week.” At the end of four months he left the Retreat, entirely cured. The obscure guilt that once linked transgression and unreason is thus shifted; the madness, as a human being originally endowed with reason, is not longer guilty of being mad; but the madman, as a madman, and in the interior of that disease of which he is no longer guilty, must feel morally responsible for everything within him that may disturb morality and society, and must hold no one but himself responsible for the punishment he receives.

We must therefore reevaluate the meanings assigned to Tuke’s work: liberation of the insane, abolition of constraint, constitution of a human milieu these are only justifications. The real operations were different. In fact, Tuke created an asylum where he substituted for the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility; fear no longer reigned on the other side of the prison gates, it now raged under the seals of conscience. Tuke now transferred the age – old terrors in which the insane had been trapped to the very heart of madness. The asylum no longer punished the madness guilt, it is true, but it did more, it organized that guilt; it organized it for the madness as a consciousness of himself, and as a nonreciprocal relation to the keeper; it organized it for the man of reason as an awareness of the other, a therapeutic intervention in the madman’s existence.

Pinel advocate no religious segregation. Or rather, a segregation that functions in the opposite direction from the practiced by Tuke. The benefits of the renovated asylum were offered to all, or almost all, except the fanatics “who believe themselves inspired and seek to make converts.” Bicêtre and La Salpêtriere, according to Pinel’s intention, from a complementary figure to the Retreat.

Religious must not be the moral substratum of life in the asylum, but purely and simply a medical object: ‘Religious opinions in a hospital for the insane must be considered only in a strictly medical relation, that is, one must set aside are other considerations of public worship and political belief, and only investigate whether it is necessary to oppose the exaltation of ideas and feelings that may originate in this source, in order to effect the cure of certain alienate minds.’ A source of strong emotions and terrifying images which it rouses through fears of the Beyond, Catholicism frequently provokes madness; it generates delirious beliefs, entertains hallucinations, leads men to despair and to melancholia. We must not be surprised if, ‘examining the registers of the insane asylum at Bicétre. We find inscribed there many priests and monks, as well as country people maddened by a frightened picture of the future: still less surprised is to see the number of religious madness vary.

But Pinel’s problem was to reduce the iconographic forms, not the moral content of religion. Once “filtered”, religion possesses a disaliarating power that dissipates the images, calms the passions, and restores man to what is most immediate and essential: it can bring him closer to his moral truth. And it is here that religion is often capable of effecting cures.

The asylum is a religious domain without religion, a domain of pure morality, of ethical uniformity. Everything that might retain the signs of the old differences was eliminated. The last vestiges of rite were extinguished, in the social sphere, the almost absolute limits of the lazar house; it was a foreign country. Now the asylum must represent the great continuity of social morality. Thr values of family and work, all the acknowledged virtues now reign in the asylum. But their reign is a double one first, they prevail in fact, at the heart of madness itself; beneath the violence and disorder of insanity, the solid nature of the essential virtues is not disrupted. There is a primitive morality which is ordinarily not affected even by the worst dementia; it is this morality which both appears and functions in the cure: “I can generally testify to the pure virtues and severe principles often manifested by the cure. Nowwhere except in novels have I seen spouses more worthy of being cherished, parents more tender, lovers more passionate, or persons more attached to their duties than the majority of the insane fortunately brought to the period of convalescence.” (23) This inalievable virtue is both the truth and the resolution of madness which is why, if it re////s, it must sign as well. The asylum reduces differences, repress vice, eliminates irregularities.

In the classical period, indigence, laziness, vice and madness mingled in an equal guilt within unreason; madmen were caught in great confinement of poverty an unemployment, but all had been promoted, in the proximity of transgression, to the essence of a Fall. Now madness belonged to social failure, which appeared without belonged to social failure, which appeared without distinction as its cause, model, and limit. Half a century later, mental disease would become degeneracy. Henceforth, the essential madness, and the really dangerous one, was that which rose from the lower depths of society.

Pinel’s asylum would never be, as a retreat from the world, a space of nature and immediate truth like Tuke’s but a uniform domain of legislation, a site of moral syntheses where insanities born on the outer limits of society were eliminated. The entire life of the inmates, and the entire conduct of their keepers and doctors, were organized by Pinel so that these moral syntheses would function. And this by three principal means:

Silence; compared to the incessant dialogue of reason and madness during the Renaissance, classical interment had been a silencing. But it was not total language was engaged in things rather that really suppressed. Confinement, prisons, dungeons, even tortures, engaged in a mute dialogue between reason and unreason – the dialogue of struggle. This dialogue itself was new disengaged; silence was absolute; there was no longer any common language between madness and reason; the languages of delirium can be answered only by an absence of languages for delirium is not a fragment of dialogue with reason it is not language at all; it refers, in an ultimately silent awareness, only to transgression. And it is only at this point that a common language becomes possible again, insofar as it will be one of acknowledged guilt.

Recognition by Mirror; the rift – between presumption and reality allows itself to be recognized only in the object. It is entirely masked, on the contrary, in the subject, which becomes immediate truth and absolute judge: the exalted sovereignty that denounces the others’ false sovereign dispossesses them and thus confirms itself in the unfailing plentitude of presumption. Madness, as simple delirium, is projected onto others; as perfect unconsciousness, it is entirely accepted. At this point that the mirror, as an accomplice, becomes an agent of demystification. Here the movement id of an entirely different nature; it is not a question of dissipating error by the impressive spectacle of a truth, even a pretended truth; but of treating madness it its arrogance rather than it its aberration. The classical mind condemned in madness certain blindness to the truth; from Pinel en madness would be regarded. rather, as an impulse from the depth which exceed the juridical limits of the individual, ignores the moral limits fixed for him, and tends to an apotheosis of the self for the nineteenth century, the initial model of madness would be to believe oneself to be God, while the preceding Centuries it had been to deny God. Thus madness, in the spectacle of itself as unreason humiliated, was able to find its salvation. When, imprisoned in the absolute subjectivity of its delirium, it surprised the absurd and objective image of that delirium in the identical madman.

Perpetual Judgement; by this play of mirrors, as by silence madness is ceaselessly called upon to judge itself. The asylum as a juridical instance recognized no other. It judged immediately, and without appeal. It possessed its own instruments of punishment, as used them as it saw fit. Everything was organized so that the madman would recognize himself in a world of judgement that enveloped him on all sides, he must know that he is awaited, judged, and condemned; from transgression to punishment, the connection must be evident, as a guilt recognized by all.

To silence, to recognized in the mirror, to perpetual judgement, we must add a fourth structure peculiar to the world of the asylum as it was constituted at the end of the eighteenth century: this is the apotheosis of the medical personage. Of them all, it is doubtless the most important, since it would authorize not only new contacts between doctor and patient, but a new relation between insanity and medical thought, and ultimately command the whole modern experience of madness. Hitherto, we find in the asylum only the same structure of confinement, but displaced and deformed. With the new status of medical personage, the deepest meaning of confinement is abolished: mental disease, with the meaning we now give it, is made possible.

In the time of Pinel and Tuke, this power had nothing extraordinary about it; it was explained and demonstrated in the efficacy, simply, of moral behavior; it was no more mysterious than the power of the eighteenth-century doctor when he diluted fluids or relaxed fibres. But very soon the meaning of this moral practice escaped the physician, to the vary extent that he enclosed his knowledge in the norms of positivism: form the beginning of the nineteenth century, the psychiatrist no longer quite know what was the nature of the power he had inherited from the great reformer, and whose efficacy seemed so foreign to his idea of mental illness and to the practice of all other doctors.

Thus while the victim of mental illness is entirely alienated in the real person of his doctor, the doctor dissipates the reality of the mental illness in the cubical concept of madness. So that there remains beyond the empty forms of positivist thought, only a single concrete reality: the doctor – patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked, and loosened. And it is to this degree that all nineteenth-century psychiatry really converges on fraud, the first man to accept in all its seriousness the reality of the physician – patient couple, the first to consent not to look away nor investigate elsewhere, the first not to attempt to hide it in a psychiatric theory that more or less harmonized with the rest of medical knowledge, the first to follow its consequences with absolute rigor. Freud demystified all the other asylum structure: he abolished silence and observation; he eliminated madness’s  recognition of itself in the mirror of its own spectacle; he silenced the instances of condemnation. But, on the other hand, he exploited the structure that enveloped the medical personage; he amplified its dramaturgical virtues, preparing for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status.

To the doctor, freud transferred all the structures Pinel and Tuke had set up within confinement. He did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his “liberators” had alienated him: but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence, he regrouped its powers, extended them to the maximum by writing them in the doctor’s hands; he created the psychoanalytic situation where, by an inspired short circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject.

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stronger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither liberate nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the life of unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning flash of such works as those of Hölderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzche, or of Artaud – forever irreducible to those alienation that can be cured, resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling, doubtless by antiphrasis, the liberation of the insane by Pinel and Tuke.

References:

1. Michel Foucault in an Interview, Paris, 1971.
2. Michel Foucault in an Interview, Paris, 1969.
3. ‘Preface’ Histoire de la folie (1961 edn.). p. Ix.
4. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason: Vintage/Random House, New York, 1973, ‘Preface’, p ix.
5. Ibid., p. x.
6. Ibid., pp. x-xi
7. Ibid., p. xi.
8. Ibid., p. xii.
9. Michel Foucault, Wahnsinn and Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 9 [This is a translation of Histoire de la folie, and abridged edition of which was translated into English as Madness and Civilization. The English edition does not include the passage cited].
10. Ibid., p. 13.
11. Ibid., p. 13.
12. Madness and Civilization: Vintage/Random House, New York, 1973, p. 209.
13. Ibid., p. 195.
14. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on language”, appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on language (New York, 1992), pp. 217-218.
15. Madness and Civilization, p. 3.
16. Madness and Civilization, p. 16.
17. Histoire de la folie, p. 58.
18. Ibid., p. 85.
19. Ibid., p. 129.
20. Samuel Tuke, Description of the Retreat, and Institution near New York for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (York, 1813), p. 23.
21. Ibid., p. 121.
22. Ibid., p. 141.
23. Phillippe Pinel, Traité medico – philosophique sur é alienation Mentale (Paris, 1801), p. 141.