On Sat, 24 May 1997, John Ransom wrote:
> > Here it would be a mistake to say that Foucault is trying to speak for
> > the mad, trying to redress an historical greivance by articualting the
> > other half of the broken dialogue.
>
> Not sure why it would be a mistake. Please elaborate if so inclined. Don't
> you think there's a sometimes-Romantic valorization of the mad in _MC_?
There might be, but I'm not sure how far I'm willing to go with it. I've
heard a similar argument in relation to _Discipline and Punish_ where it
was suggested that Foucault valorizes the individual sovereign and the
system of punishment while denigrating the system of discipline, that in
some way he takes a certain glee in presenting the dismemberment of
Dameins. Its problematic to proceed along these lines in that this type
of argument seems to rely on a sense of advocacy, a sense that in some way
Foucault is establishing a simple opposition between madness and reason,
or between a disciplinary system and a system of punishment, and that he
is attempting to sell one side of this opposition over the other. There
is a difference between being an advocate for someone, valorizing the mad
in order to allow them to speak in a space where they have been forced to
silence, and attempting to problematize the relation between reason and
madness such that madness itself becomes a viable mode for speaking. Its
not an issue of returning speech to those who have been denied but rather
a problem of constituting madness as a positive condition for speaking.
In the discussion at Royaumont following the presentation of
"Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" Foucualt made the claim that Nietzsche had a
profound consciousness of madness. It seems clear that he's not saying
that Nietzsche was simply, crazy otherwise why talk about him at all? I
would even go further and say that its clear that he's not saying that
Nietzsche's 'genius' is the result of his madness, as if in Nietzsche
madness becomes the vehicle for the expression of reason. The
traditional argument about the ability of artistic madness to create the
beautiful by transcending reason without really escaping it just doesn't
seem to hold here. Rather in saying that Nietzsche had a consciousness
of madness, or in saying the same thing about Artaud and Bataille,
Foucualt is claiming that their writing occures in a space where reason
and madness have an equal weight, a space where the one is not
dialectically rendered by the other, a space where madness is not
subsumed by reason and does not occur as the simple failing of reason.
Nietzsche cannot be understood by a simple appeal to reason because
Nietzsche cannot be understood, since understanding is the product of
reason. To understand Nietzsche the approach must be made from the side
of madness where madness forms a viable condition for the production of
knowledge.
> > Here the silence does speak in a
> > certain form but not in the manner that the monolgue of psychiatry
> > speaks. The psychiatric monolugue constitutes its object (the mad)
> > according to a set of rules for speaking which, through their
> > articulation, invoke the proper form of the subject (the sane). What we
> > don't have here is a simple exclusion of the form: The mad are excluded from
> > society, relegated to silence, _because_ they are not sane. Rather, the
> > silence of madness forms the limit condition by which the the monologue
> > of psychiatry is drawn into itself as a cohesive rule set.
>
> The condition of psychiatry's existence is the impenetrable silence of
> madness?
To a certain extent the answer is yes, but not in the sense that the
silence of madness preceeds psychiatry in a temporal sense. Rather
silence, as the subjectively unspeakable, is a precondition established
by psychiatry which allows it to form its object of analysis as an
object. Or, to put it another way, the silence of madness is the
condition of possibility by which psychiatry renders subjectivity as an
object. Here madness is spoken dialectically from the standpoint of reason.
>
> --John
Flannon