• Preface
• Stultifera Navis

Preface

In the preface Foucault outlines his method. Foucault’s method is archeological. He traces how the internalisation of exclusion operated in different times, how forms from the past influenced action in the present. Initially, there was no distinct differentiation between Reason and Madness.

We must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of Madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience.

The ghost of Heidegger haunts the text: we seek an origin, so as to make a new beginning. For both their History is as much a creation, as an exegesis. That’s the method’s weakness, as well as its strength.

We must describe, from the start of its trajectory, that ‘other form’ which relegates Reason and Madness to one side or other its action as things henceforth external, deaf to all exchange, and as though dead to one another.

Foucault’s central contention is that Reason speaks for Madness, and it is through analysing this one sided monologue that we gain a full picture of the history of Madness. The book is, essentially, an ethical project. How are the questions we ask about each other determined by the attitudes we have towards each other? These questions (especially in the Human Sciences) are partly positive: how do we actually act towards each other? But they are simultaneously normative: how are we to be? They are inextricable from each other.

What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made and calm restored.

Madness was once a feature of everyday life, but now has been relegated to the status of disease. Thus Madness is both silenced and managed. Now only Reason speaks; it speaks for Madness and about Madness in the language of psychiatry. The book traces this journey: from a time when madness was interwoven into the fabric of life, prominently featured in Renaissance and Middle Age images of the damned, hell, revelations, and knowledge, to its current representation in clinical practice.

Finally, Foucault posits that Madness is something unique to the Western mind, and which gives Western reason some of its depth. Akin to the spectre of Hubris which animated the Sophosynimi. This part of European culture predates Hieronymus Bosch, and will be with us long after Nietzsche and Artaud.

Stultifera Navis

Foucault is a master of narrative, like all great writers he begins with mystery. In the era of the Renaissance, Europe underwent a transformative shift. Lazar houses, once brimming with lepers, emptied as the sources of infection dwindled. But society’s thirst for exclusion didn’t vanish; it simply sought a new target.

What doubtless remained longer than leprosy…were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of…that figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle.

Europe needed the imaginative figure of the leper to make sense of itself. The leper was an earthly manifestation of God, and was cast off only once we had made them sacred. If the leper could manifest the grace of God, then so could we. Like the Madman later (or, still later, the Homosexual) the leper was essential to the cosmology of the age. Normality is constituted through deviance, and we need to leave our mark on the deviant. Social exclusion is spiritual reintegration.

Enter the Ship of Fools, a symbolic vessel carrying the mad, drifting away from the mainland yet tethered eternally to our collective unconsciousness. The insane were not incarcerated during this period. Instead, they were cast out of towns, effectively banished to seek “Reason” on a unique pilgrimage at sea. In lieu of a workable treatment, the mad were condemned to search for their reason. They became a symbol in the imagination of the Renaissance. If were possible to lose your reason, then you could also find it.

…these Ships of Fools…were pilgrimage boats; highly symbolic cargoes of Madmen in search of their reason.

Despite becoming an otherworldly figure, the Madman wasn’t deprived of his freedom. They were condemned to wander: from the Ship of Fools they may never disembark. Yet they were also of the world, the Ship could dock anywhere. The sea connects to all rivers, all ports. The meaning of their exclusion is thus closer to rite than social utility. The mad were not undifferentiated from that Sane. So they may yet disembark.

The notion of water being associated with madness wasn’t new; it had permeated collective thought for centuries. Yet, the emergence of the Ship of Fools at the end of the fifteenth century was telling. It encapsulated society’s ‘great disquiet,’ a term devoid of any rational or cosmological justification.

…a long series of “follies” which, stigmatising vices and faults as in the past, no longer attribute them all to pride, to lack of charity, to neglect of Christian virtues, but to a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible.

Prior to the modern era we saw and judged behaviour according to a different cosmology. One in which we were deficient in some kind of virtue, or overloaded with some vice. While artists like Bosch could still see cosmic intricacies in madness, the age of Erasmus marked a pivot. Now one could be either ‘reasonable’ or ‘mad.’ Either way you were absolved of any responsibility.

Reason became constituted dialectically, and not something ‘in and of itself’ apart from Madness. The Madman is as integral to modernity as the Scientist or Philosopher.

Madness or Folly was at work, at the very heart of reason and truth.

The ideal modern subject was Rational, and engaged in a project beyond himself. The project of Civilisation. Yet Reason being constituted through Madness meant that civilisation was unstable: it was always a project which could fall apart. Not only did Madness constitute reason, but for that constitution to have meaning the Mad would need to be separated from the Reasonable. Otherwise the division could not be held up.

it is the tide of Madness…that shows that the world is near its catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.

For the Renaissance Madness was no longer a cosmic event or a herald of the apocalypse; it became a mere flaw in man, initiating the ethical shift that would prelude the Great Confinement of the 17th century. Though madness became more ‘moralised,’ it retained its intractable nature. Restoration from madness was unthinkable; it stood as an unyielding illusion of punishment. Even as it evolved, characters grappling with madness could still unwittingly speak truths, providing ironic clarity amidst their delusions.

The Madman or Fool assumed an ever-increasing role in the literary narratives of the age, a role that allowed for unfiltered truth-telling in a world steeped in deception. In this way, madness danced in the heart of reason and truth. It stood as a precursor to the apocalypse, and it represented the shift in the cosmology of early modernity, where prudence or reason ousted the harmonious dance between folly and prudence that had been the norm in the mediaeval worldview.

By the time of the classical experience, the Ship of Fools metamorphosed into the madhouse. A transformation that tied madness inextricably to the yardsticks of reason and truth. In this regard, madness no longer required a true referent; its power lay in its ability to carry illusion to the point of truth. Thus, the Ship of Fools completed its journey, docking permanently in the harbour of societal scrutiny, its passengers disembarking into the tightly regulated asylums that marked the next chapter in the ever-evolving narrative of madness.