Michel Foucault - Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique
11.11.2023
I began reading this about a week ago now, but due to my own stupidity forgot to journal about it. For now, just some brief thoughts on what I've read so far. I ought to write more completely later.
PREMIÈRE PARTIE
11.11.2023
His writing about the medieval and early Rennaissance conception of madness as connection to some other, unexpressed realm of truth (even that of the person behind the persona) is reminding me that I need to read Deleuze; particularly as regards schizoanalysis and the body without organs. There's something about expression of a potential...
Of course, I am particularly drawn by his description of the joining of madness with the concpetion of work as a moral obligation, and particularly as a human one. There's something that has been bothering me about certain current disability discourses in general, and it's the way in which (for the sake of consistency, let us remain on the topic of madness) the classification of a mental illness or even a symptom functions just as much to confirm the ideal human type (with which it is in opposition). One might argue, for example (and many have), that "I cannot work the typical 40-hour work-week on account of my mental illness, and for this reason I should not be expected to." It is entirely true that a variety of mental factors may make the typical work arrangement particularly strenuous or even impossible for a certain individual. But to say that for this reason in particular a person should not be expected to submit themself to this arrangement requires the assumption that there would, otherwise, exist a certain obligation to do so—that submission to a certain order (today: the bourgeouis order) is human nature, deviation from which is one only given the "right" to (and a right is always granted, it is always already a matter of a priori restraint) if one's own deficiency and failure in achieving this human nature has been measured, defined, and classified. (A matter of justification...)
(Can I connect this to a "monster haunted (or perhaps possessed, I'm not yet certain) by humanity"?
Or, as Foucault himself wrote (my own rough translation):
This field, it was in fact circumscribed by the space of internment; and the way in which it was formed ought to indicate to us how the experience of madness is constituted.
Overall, I think Foucault has very effectively demonstrated the link between our current medical understanding of mental illness and the moralism in which it originated. A particularly strong link one still finds today is in the psychopathologization of criminality, quite blatantly seen in "anti-social personality disorder", of which disregard for the law is a symptom. Of course, our conceptions of health in general are quite intimately tied up with power.
He has mentioned how some of those who were "mad" were placed in hospitals, while some were placed in prisons, remarking on a divide on whether it was judge that they could be "cured". I do wonder, sometimes, what leads to the difference in conception of, and response to, modern forms of madness; one who commits a crime may expect to be placed in a mental hospital on an insanity plea if one can demonstrate schizophrenia, but a more "moral" disorder such as narcissism...? The so-called narcissist or psychopath is seen rather as an ontological evil, sick perhaps, but not in a way that deserves the same sympathy as the schizophrenic. But what drives this? Is it not a wish to believe in some fundamentally moral human nature? (Such debates become even more consternating when one does not particularly believe in "free will", which in many cases madness seems to be defined in opposition to but I digress.)
I hadn't known that a sort of "madhouse" had already existed in the Arabic world during Europe's middle age, which may well have inspired the Western ones; quite an interesting piece of history.
Foucault's writing of a generalized déraison which encompassed not only madness, but criminality, homosexuality, libertinism, etc. of course connects to a general critique of a certain "reason" which seeks to discover a truth that does not describe the material qualities of the physical world or even the subjective experiences of any being in it, but rather a certain nature to which they ought to correspond. The horrible specter of idealism...
Haha, or as he writes later:
Two independent spheres of experience thus came into being, and it would appear that throughout the classical age, the experience of madness was lived in two different ways. It was as though the legal subject was surrounded by a specific halo of unreason; he was both defined and controlled by the judicial recognition of his irresponsibility and incapacity, by the decree of interdiction and the definition of his disease. A different halo of unreason, or so it seems, surrounded man as a social being, defining and controlling him in the consciousness of scandal and the practice of confinement. These two domains did on occasion intersect, but they always remained eccentric to each other, and defined two essentially different forms of alienation.
One was taken to be a limitation of subjectivity, and was a line drawn around an individual showing the limits of his powers and designating the areas where he could not be held responsible. In this alienation the subject was dispossessed of his liberty by a double movement – the natural movement of his madness, and the juridical movement of interdiction, which brought him under the power of an Other – other people in general, effectively represented by his guardian. The other form of alienation was the sudden consciousness, within his own society, that a madman was a stranger in his own land. Rather than being freed from his responsibility, he was made to feel guilty by association and kinship with other bearers of guilt: he became the Other, the Outsider, the Excluded. The strange concept of ‘psychological alienation’, which is thought to have its roots in psychopathology, however enriched with ambiguities from other domains of reflexion, is little more than the anthropological confusion of these two different experiences of alienation, the first of which concerns those who have fallen under the power of the Other, and are chained to his liberty; while the second is the individual turned Other, excluded from the fraternal resemblance between men. The one is close to the determinism of sickness, while the other takes on the appearance of an ethical condemnation. When the nineteenth century decided that unreason should be treated in hospital, and that confinement should be a therapeutic process aimed at curing the sick, the decision came about through a coup that reduced to a confused unity, which it is difficult for us to disentangle, these diverse themes of alienation and the multiple faces of madness, which classical rationalism had always allowed to appear.
What I've been saying!!
12.11.2023
Actually, the connection of madness with a human ethic (or here non-ethic) and subcription to this ethic as the "free" choice of reason must in fact be inseparable from the perception of the mad as a lack or failure of will in opposition to the sane.
Quite enjoying the section on the demonstration of madness and the making of a spectacle while at the same time it is treated as scandalous and as something to be hidden. It's something I've felt quite often myself, finding that my more "mad" art or performances are what achieve the most entranced reactions, while at the same time I as a person am not at all to express any mad tendencies in my own behavior, and should I find a certain mental tendency, it is to be kept to myself.
What Foucault describes of the animality of madness in the neo-classical era and of the need (according to the discourse of the time) for it to be "trained" rather than treated away reminds me of a thought that has been bouncing around in my own head for a little while. For much contemporary discourse, at any rate, relies on the concept of a human nature even if (and perhaps even particularly when) it goes unstated. There are now certain classifications which do still, to me, seem to fall under a certain conceived animality which must be trained until it is brought under control. Often, for example, autism, and "therapies" such as Applied Behavioral Anaylsis—currently, of course, there is a backlash against such conceptualizations and methods, but a certain degree of insitutionalization remains. But one asks—what is the function of defining this animal human? And one replies—it is so that humanity proper may forget its own animality and the training to which it is less explicitly subjected. The training of "proper", socially compliant behavior is in fact a conceptual performance which creates human nature in the one who takes to it more readily. There is field circumscribed by the space of internment, and a humanity circumscribed by the space of animality.
DEUXIÈME PARTIE
21.11.2023
Unfortunately haven't been doing much of simply sitting down and reading lately, reading rather in spurts (i.e. waiting for classes to begin), which is not the most conducive to my goals for this journal. But I've gotten a good way into the second part by now. I particular enjoyed the examination of madness as tied to passion, which itself joins soul and body.
I also quite liked the description of madness as following its own reason and perceiving some inner world rather than the external one. This aligns with my own experience of delusion—it always follows logical threads, though those threads may be thin or tied to non-existent supports.
22.11.2023
Continuing, I have just finished the section on mania and melancholy. Insightful his final comment about symptoms being given their significance by the "structure of perception" in which they are described, serving as a visible presence of truth. I would tend to agree; the way in which one describes a symptom (if one describes it at all) relies heavily on previous assumptions of truth which any statement requires in order to be sensible. Symptomization, then, by presenting a structure of perception, reinforces the structure of truth lying underneath.
Have now finished the description of how hysteria and hypochondria came to be see as mental disorders—of a weakness of the soul corresponding to a weakness of the body, resulting in a natural punishment of moral fault. This would come with the perceptive structures which modern psychiatry required. I can see Foucault's interest in "disciplined bodies" peeking through here, and it's quite understandable. To some extent, I'm surprised it took until recent centuries for such a shift to occur, given the soul's long ideological reign over the body.
25.11.2023
Struck by Foucault's description of water immersion as a treatment being a revived sort of baptism; it reminds me of a certain reflection I had on one of my own experiences. My mother had taken me to the local Christian family doctor to find some direction in "treating" my dysphoria. The nurse told me that I ought to undergo psychotherapy for general mental issues, which she believed would also resolve my "sexual confusion" (by which she meant not only my desire to transition, but also any deviant sexuality). This did not happen, as it would have been legally difficult if not impossible for my mother to find such a therapist. Nevertheless, it struck me as some new type of exorcism, one clothing itself just barely in science.
Absolutely in love with his description of the paradoxicality of madness's function as the embodiment of evil/bad (I'm not quite which word the English translation uses for mal), which was itself to be a non-entity. Though he is focusing on medical practice in this moment and therefore not particularly discussing humanism, there's a clear thread of criticism towards humanism here; the idea of some human Truth or Reality composed along moral principles, which necessitates the unreality of any deviation, even as it occurs materially, resulting in a person "alienated" (as was a common term for madness) from being, even their own being.
Finished with the second part of the book. Interesting how Foucault observes how psychoanalysis attempts to engage in dialogue with madness in opposition to modern psychiatry. There's something to this, I think, although I do not quite know enough of the psychoanalytic approach to say much more. Still, though, I'm reminded of psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliam's approach to "schizoid dynamics" and the over non-pathologizing approach she takes, approaching the schizoid personality on its own terms. I don't entirely agree with the essay, but will leave a link to Some Thoughts about Schizoid Dynamics as an overall nuanced, thoughtful read by which I myself felt quite understood.
TROISÈME PARTIE
27.11.2023
Insightful description of the relationship between madness, freedom, desire, and self-possession. What particular struck me was the irreversible interiority of passion and unachieved desire
. It reminds of both Crash and Tetsuo. The former demonstrates such a significant unachieved desire and interiorization that it leads only to death—in the latter is so for the salaryman's girlfriend, but not for the salaryman or the metal fetishist. I must return to this later; this thread may be indispensable for my academic projects.
Another very good thread found when he observes how novels were portrayed as a corrupting influence leading to madness due to their fictitious nature. Again I see something of a strong potential/actual dialectic here and a fear of the potential, lurking in the disordered and unexpressed part of a person. From this lense the artistic vision of self-creation becomes important, and recalls the "new worlds" of Tetsuo.
The above paragraphs I begin to see in connection with my "desire for sickness"... if health if obligatory and tied to capital and productivity, if it cannot be experienced outside of confines, do we have for our own anything other than sickness, and as its final consummation, death?
02.12.2023
There is something to the description of the mad as "alienated" from themselves; not, of course, in the sense that this is true, for I would disagree. What is seems to me is a symptom (hah!) of the thought that there is a specific form which one ought to have, and which is necessarily deformed by madness. This is quite a limiting view of the individual, which denies any proper self-creation, all of this being lost in the endless impossible quest to (in modern, pop-quasi-psychological terms) "find oneself". Can it constitute anything other than an absolute denial of autonomy, of authenticity as being made by oneself?
Like a revelation reading that the internment of the mad can no longer, then, be other than the sanction of a de fait state, the translation, in juridical terms, of an abolition of liberty already acquired at the psychological level.
It slides a lot of pieces together—of course, if freedom is the use of human reason and the mad is deprived of human reason, then he is not free to begin with—and his internment is justified.
Psychological interiority was born from the exteriority of the scandalized conscience.
One finds in here as well something of the roots of a schizoid personality—a retreat and interment within oneself in response to an unbearable external consciousness—the social mechanism of exclusion so complete that the madness silences itself.
Immediately taken in with the description of the jury as a sort of "sovereign" which represents the body of the people. In part it strikes me because of my experience in class just yesterday—several of my classmates are (at least symbolic) monarchists who desire this "sovereign" as a representative of the national people. Of course, what does this constitute but identification with one's own servitude, a happy identification with the very process of governing which restricts oneself; and by this embodiment, one imagines this confinement of the will as its very manifestation! when one is identified with the very laws, norms, and sanity against which one has transgressed—how can one not be alienated from everything, even from oneself? When the moral is universal, what option is there to be but a schizoid retreat?
06.12.2023
Finished reading last night. A very good work. I can certainly see the influence on Agamben, particularly when Fouvault writes of madness as a mirror through which humanity recognizes itself. I much appreciated his remarks about art. I've felt a certain bitterness myself in being told that my writing is "very human" when I write schizoid characters who are in fact quite removed from humanity. Not because this assessment is because it is untrue, but because it is—only the human can be separated from humanity. The inhumanized becomes a place of articulation for humanity, haunted by humanity no matter how much it wishes otherwise, ultimately an object of consumption on which the human body feeds.
Fascinating as well was what he wrote as madness of being conceptually inseparable from the birth of humanity, from love and death. I recall Łukasz Musiał's wonderful essay ZwierzoczłekoKafka and the "pre-world" described therein, in which lurks inevitable death, and of which culture is an attempt to forget. It struck me, although I could never agree entirely with the bleak view it seemed to have of this pre-world. In this same negation of what exists there lies the wondrous beauty of what could be. Sometimes madness, forced to articulate humanity, is the articulation of this inhuman possibility.