A closer reading of Histoire de la folie reveals the lack of any strict and deter-mined conception of ‘madness’, which would allow Foucault to trace the history of madness in and of itself, as suggested by Derrida. 38 Nowhere does Foucault define any such a- or super-historical meanings. As Barthes suggested upon a reading of the work, Foucault seems quite conscious of madness not being “the object of knowledge , whose history must be rediscovered ... instead madness is nothing but this knowledge itself ... it is a variable and perhaps hetero-geneous meaning .” 39
Madness as a border. The instance allowing for a history of madness across time and space is not that madness has a given object of reference but that it is what Barthes designated a “functional reality” within a social constel-lation. Madness may be traced because it is a trans-historical structure that makes possible a certain effect and which can point out various social entities as actors that are suitable for taking up such a role. Blanchot is therefore correct in maintaining that Foucault’s primary aim is “the division [le partage] ... or the exclusion [l’exclusion] – and not what one excludes or divides.” 40 Madness is constituted first as a trans-historical structure with a certain function in force of a particular boundary that shapes social interaction.
37 “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre” [1964], DE I: 420/ HM: 549.
38 J. Derrida: “Cogito et histoire de la folie” (1963), p. 66.
39 R. Barthes: “Savoir et folie,” Critique , vol. 17 (1961), p. 916.
40 M. Blanchot: Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (1986), 12.
Foucault is thus well aware of the fact that the time period preceding the starting point of his narrative was not characterized by any original unity – there were merely other boundaries. At the same time, he is conscious that the mad in the Renaissance only existed as a group that could take up a central role in the consciousness of that time in force of a boundary and the marginal existence they could thus maintain. In this light, what was introduced in the Classical Age was above all another type of marginalization, which bypassed the former marginal form of existence by way of establishing a radical break between two diametrically opposed entities. Finally, it was through yet another marginalization that the mad were recognized as a group at the beginning of modernity. Emerging here as an isolated entity in unique opposition to the rest of society, marginalization had now become so absolute that the mad were no longer experienced as a challenge and a temptation. Instead this group was now so securely externalized within the confines of the asylum that they could be examined at a distance. The mad were now those whose marginal existence in the common society was of no importance for carrying out the examination of the logic expressed in their madness.
Histoire de la folie therefore constantly exhibits an accentuated consciousness of boundaries and limits. Instead of following Tardits’, Habermas’s and Derrida’s readings of the book as a history of the marginalized, it therefore seems more prudent to characterize Histoire de la folie as a history of margins – more sig-nificantly a historical analysis of how the borders between society and the excluded came into being. Not before writing a history of the constitutions of margins and social borders does it become truly possible to write a history of the marginalized and excluded.
Madness and reason. Since Histoire de la folie sketches the history of madness by following the development of borders and boundaries, it is not only a history of what was excluded in this process but also a history of what it was that was in the process of excluding madness. In Foucault’s account, Western societies have tended to bundle up or even congregate the greater part of what is expe-rienced as the opposite of madness under the concept of “reason.” We have learned to experience and recognize madness as unreason and irrationality.
When Foucault traces the history of madness from the Renaissance to the time of the French Revolution, he therefore also gives indirect access to an alter-native history of reason. The history of madness provides the contours of the history of Western rationality by bringing attention to the outlines of ration-ality over and against the excluded. Circuitously, the book raises the issue of how core traits of modern society are founded on the border between reason and madness.
A history that draws attention to how society is in a certain sense consti-tuted inside or rather on the border, considers reason and madness in
accordance with Barthes’ aforementioned notion of “functional realities,” or in the role of what Foucault later designated a “transactional reality” [réalité de transaction], correlating different entities to act within a wider context. 41 Reason and madness are opposing concepts that refer to and mirror each other. The nature of madness and the mad cannot be determined without reference to the very reason from which they are excluded and against which they act. On the other hand, common sense and reason only attain their content by reflecting madness, from which they are distinguished. Through this act of dividing they are shown what they are not. A structural determin-ation of “un-reason [dé-raison],” or the opposite of reason, allows Foucault to examine this through an extended historical development. In the same manner, a determination of madness as a certain structural content of unreason – a content where the insane function as an opposite of reason – permits emphasis on this concept across various historical ruptures. While the insane can be understood as merely non-rational, or that which differs from reason, madness denotes the unreason that is the opposite of reason and which it may mirror. 42
In Histoire de la folie , Foucault demonstrates how rationality’s relation with madness was slowly transformed up through modern times. The book begins with Renaissance reason, which banished its opposite, such that reason and madness mutually challenged each other. Such reason is still found in Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) Essais . Montaigne’s moderate skepticism did not allow the possibility of condemning madness, since it was still a very real pos-sibility that madness was present in every thought. It could still appear as a companion on the road of thought. The presence of madness could result in the categorical rejection of something as absolutely wrong or impossible, or
41 [NP]: 301/{ BP }: 297.
42 The notion of dé-raison was not only part of the title of the fi rst version of Histoire de la folie . It was also the division between reason and unreason implied in the notion that had been important for Foucault’s earliest work on the history of madness. In a letter from 1957 regarding a fi rst draft of the book, addressed to the Swedish specialist in the history of ideas and the history of science Stirn Lindroth, who had responded critically to the manuscript, Foucault admitted that he had not been able to defi ne his general project, which was “not to write a history about the development of psychiatric science.”
Rather the aim was to write “a history concerning the social, moral, imaginative context in which this science evolved. Because it seems to me that up until the 19th century, not to say up till the present day, no objective science about madness was possible, but only the formulation, in the terms of scientifi c analogy, of a certain experience (moral, social, etc.) of Unreason [Déraison]. In a way such as this – not very objective, not very scien-tifi c, not very historical – [I attempted] to approach the question. But maybe this project is absurd and doomed already in advance.” “Lettre de Michel Foucault à Stirn Lindroth, le 10 auôt 1957”; our translation.
completely lacking truth, whereby it could come to view its own relative and limited perspective as absolute. 43
The next step in the book is concerned with reason as it appears around the time of the great confinement in the Classical Age, at which time it swiftly excluded its opposite by rejecting the irrational out of hand. Foucault first finds a structural analogy to such rationality in René Descartes’ (1596–1650) Meditations de prima philosophia , which was first printed in 1641, that is, shortly before Louis XIV’s edict regarding the construction of the Hôpital Général. 44 Here madness occurs already on the first pages, describing the journey toward certain knowledge, which was set about by Descartes’ methodological doubt.
It appears along with the sensory apparatus and dreams as a possible source of error. Just as sensory phenomena and dreams, madness can instill ideas that on the face of things appear credible but that on closer inspection turn out to be faulty. In unison, these sources of ideational error and wrong conceptions force us to accept the necessity of doubting even the apparently secure and incontrovertible. While the challenge from sensory experience and dreams can be included in the meditation because they are sources of illusion, which point toward a remnant of truth, Descartes treats madness in a fundamentally different way. It is included in passing only to be rejected as a source of any cognition. The philosopher is able to identify with the victim of sensory and dream-related illusion in finding a reason to doubt these and instead locates a deeper truth that is not in doubt, since it was the precondition for the pos-sibility of illusion. Over and against this, madness appears as something that thought cannot enter into, already at the beginning of the metaphysical medi-tations. 45 Madness does not appear as a form of existence that can be taken
43 HF: 57–58/ HM: 45–46. “The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride. This creature knows and sees that he is lodged down here, among the mire and the shit of the world, bound and nailed to the deadest, most stagnant part of the universe, in the low-est storey of the building, the farthlow-est from the vault of heaven; his characteristics place him in the third and lowest category of animate creatures, yet, in thought, he sets him-self above the circle of the Moon, bringing the very heavens under his feet” (Montaigne, Essays, trans. M.A. Screech, Book 2, Chapter XII, 505; cf. HM: 32 ).
44 HF: 56–59/ HM: 44–47.
45 This immediate rejection comes about in the following section found early in the fi rst meditation of R. Descartes Meditations de prima philosophia (1644): “And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare my-self to certain persons, devoid of sense [Fr. insensez; Lat. insanus], whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthen-ware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad [Fr. fous;
Lat. demens], and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extrav-agant” (Trans. E. S. Haldane, 1911; MPPh [1644], p. 8).
up in order to attain a deeper understanding of the everyday world. Rather, it surfaces a fundamental yet impossible eventuality that thought must reject from the very outset, immediately conscious of its difference, in order to attain validity. One cannot think and be mad at the same time, since the mad are those caught up in unreason. The mad are by definition “the Others.”
Around the time when Pinel and Tuke release the mad, we find a movement toward a rationality that appears far more tolerant toward its opposite, since it no longer figures as a radical challenge. Foucault described the rise of a com-prehensive, modern, dialectical and human type of reason, which was able to lose itself in anything that appeared alien – only to reassert itself there in an ever more self-certain and inclusive manner. Hegel’s dialectical reasoning may be seen as a classical representative of this turn. Inclusive dialectical reasoning may be seen as culminating in Hegel’s statement in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History that “the actual working of [God’s] government – the carrying out of his plan – is the history of the world” and that “in the pure light of this divine idea” of “the illusion that the world is a mad or foolish happening disappears.” 46 Hegel sees it as an important aim for reason to expose itself to and contemplate the alien, but with the certainty that this will dissolve and once more point toward reason. Foucault therefore suggests that while it at first sight seems an inclusive approach to madness, it risks devolving into a monolithic evaluation from above as a result of its own irreproachable self-certainty. Madness is therefore not permitted to express itself as a subject but is only included on the condition that it is comprehended with the objectifying gaze of reason.
Delimitation and alienation: A basic condition. Foucault points out how the exclusive relation between reason and madness is established at the beginning of the modern era. His account of the border, which delimits madness and reason, does not primarily center on breaks and ruptures but has the character of a continuous development. First and foremost, Histoire de la folie is concerned with the gradual, tardy transformation of that very delimitation. It depicts how contrasts that challenge each other develop from antagonistic counterparts to strictly separated opposites, until finally their mutual distance proves so great that any relationship between them becomes invisible. It shows a slow trans-formation and gradual intensification of the border that – in retrospect – results in it attaining the character of a discontinuity or, basically, a rupture.
Concerned with a delimitation that ultimately develops an abyss so insur-mountable that those whom society reflects itself in are no longer experienced as part of humanity, Histoire de la folie is therefore also a study of an ongoing
46 G.W.F. Hegel: The Philosophy of History , trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener, Ontario, Batoche Books, 2001), p. 51; translation modifi ed.
social alienation, and Foucault’s first major work sheds light on an important question: by what means is something that presented itself as an opposite no longer experienced as an immediate challenge but as a representative of an alien, non-human logic, as imbedded in a complete differentiation between society and that which is external to society – those who are the absolutely
“asocial.” 47 However, it is a central point of the book that the rejected, upon closer inspection, are shown to cohere with society in force of the reciprocity.
This becomes obvious when Foucault contrasts the modern opposition between reason and madness with other historically relevant delimitations. 48
Both in the preface to the first edition of Histoire de la folie from 1961 and in the later commentary to the book entitled “La folie, l‘absence d‘œuvre,” first published in 1964, Foucault compares the modern European relationship to madness with the classical Greek relationship to hubris – a term traditionally used to signify ‘wanton violence’, arising from the pride of strength or from passion, or ‘insolence’, but also ‘an outrage’, both in a concrete and in a more abstract sense. 49 By this notion the Greeks apparently related to a lack of
47 The ongoing history within Histoire de la folie could therefore be written under the impression of the 20th-century experiences of concentration camps and gulags. Foucault seeks to understand how individual societal groups could be experienced as expressing a logic so asocial as to warrant extermination without those initiating such extermination coming to question their own humanity.
48 At the outset of the historical explanation found in Histoire de la folie , Foucault de-scribes how the lepers played a similar role in medieval society as the one given to the mad later on (HF: 13–24/ HM: 3–8). The High Middle Ages saw a great number of people stricken with a disease that manifested itself as rashes, sores, abscesses, deformation of the fi ngers and bones and slow decay that fi nally resulted in death. This group of lepers was cut off from usual social contact, since they – especially from the 1200s till the middle of the 1400s – were increasingly isolated and confi ned to hospitals. In 1266 there were 2,000 lepers in France alone. Although these were separated and expelled from society, since they were considered “unclean” and “living dead,” the illness was also viewed as an earthly purgatory that not only expressed God’s anger but also love since the affl icted were brought closer to heavenly salvation. From the middle of the 1300s these leper colo-nies were disbanded. According to Foucault, this was because the isolation made possible by seclusion and contact was broken with the Middle Eastern areas of contagion follow-ing the end of the crusades around 1300. However, medieval societies were constituted by the distance created with and the refl ection in the lepers, just as later societies did in regard to the mad. Foucault notes how the “structures still remained” and three hundred years later, although the leper and leprosy disappears: “The forms this exclusion took would continue, in a radically different culture and with new meaning, but remaining essentially the major form of rigorous division, at the same time social exclusion and spiritual reintegration” (HF: 16/ HM: 6). What Foucault seems to imply by this historical parallel is the necessity of understanding this pattern in order to comprehend the Middle Ages and its relationship to the lepers, just as one must understand the whole structure if one wishes to understand modern society and its relationship to the mad.
49 Liddell and Scott: A Greek-English Lexicon , s.v.
moderation when they defined the limits for acceptable behavior and common sense. Hubris appeared as the basic format of unreason that was to be avoided (if this was even possible). This was done by taking up a sound and moderate healthy mindedness ( sophrosyne), which was exhibited in sensible speech (logos) as cool-headed, virtuous, and excellent behavior (arēte). This position is found in the condemnatory descriptions of Thrasymachus and Callicles in Plato’s dialogues The Republic and Gorgias from the 4th century BC. The dialogues not only show how power-ideology argues for elevating the strong above the circumstances into which he enters, but also how the strong bombastically promotes himself without further consideration. Individuals who do not know themselves and their limits not only manage their own life poorly but also risk corruption, dragging others down with them.
Although the Greeks thus distanced themselves from excessive behavior, in that it constituted an ongoing threat that must be condemned, Foucault does not interpret them as being completely disjoined from it. Rather “the Greeks were not distant from hubris because they condemned it, but rather were in the distance of that excess, in the midst of the distance at which they kept it confined.” 50 In this respect, the Greeks were constantly related to a challenge, an ongoing encounter, which they could not ignore once they had identified
Although the Greeks thus distanced themselves from excessive behavior, in that it constituted an ongoing threat that must be condemned, Foucault does not interpret them as being completely disjoined from it. Rather “the Greeks were not distant from hubris because they condemned it, but rather were in the distance of that excess, in the midst of the distance at which they kept it confined.” 50 In this respect, the Greeks were constantly related to a challenge, an ongoing encounter, which they could not ignore once they had identified