My name is Michael Bibby. Currently, i am working on
addressing and engaging many of the themes with which
Madness and Civilization concerns itself with a view
to reactivating and more amply dilating the same. Roy
Porter was right at least about one thing: we have not
absorbed the insights this work of most penetrating
sagacitity alights upon. Like all works of great
moment, Madness and Civilization was wrought like a
miracle; and all the more so in that Foucault did
precisely what he said could not be done: 'the history
of madness cannot be written'. In so far as history is
the work of art and madness the absence of the work of
art, the 'constitutive moment of its abolition', this
ironizing work is at once both the work of art and
that of madness. We may situate it in that strange
place- doubtless an uncomfortable region- where their
difference is not yet given, and their relations are
endlessly reversible; the one being found in the
other, it not being at all clear where the one ends
and the other begins.
I invite discussion of any and all aspects of this
heady, as sobering as it is intoxicating, work.
Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com
addressing and engaging many of the themes with which
Madness and Civilization concerns itself with a view
to reactivating and more amply dilating the same. Roy
Porter was right at least about one thing: we have not
absorbed the insights this work of most penetrating
sagacitity alights upon. Like all works of great
moment, Madness and Civilization was wrought like a
miracle; and all the more so in that Foucault did
precisely what he said could not be done: 'the history
of madness cannot be written'. In so far as history is
the work of art and madness the absence of the work of
art, the 'constitutive moment of its abolition', this
ironizing work is at once both the work of art and
that of madness. We may situate it in that strange
place- doubtless an uncomfortable region- where their
difference is not yet given, and their relations are
endlessly reversible; the one being found in the
other, it not being at all clear where the one ends
and the other begins.
I invite discussion of any and all aspects of this
heady, as sobering as it is intoxicating, work.
Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com