Architectonic

This is a working paper I am posting with the aim of garnering criticism of my interpretation (improper omissions, ungrounded claims, etc) as well as to help those who, like me, are plodding their way through this great and difficult text.  –ct

In his preface, Foucault gives a preview of his project in full. In conducting an archeology of madness Foucault wishes to uncover the origin of our current state of affairs in which madness is safely circumscribed within psychopathology; the strict separation between the medicalized mentally ill and their sane counterparts already effected. In order to trace the origin of this schism, Foucault explains “we must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself” (ix).

Methodologically we must proceed cautiously, following a characteristically poststructuralist inclination to tread lightly upon history. We must “speak of that initial dispute [between madness and reason] without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory”. In this first of Foucault’s many transformative works revisioning history, we are told to take leave of the Historian’s value-free faith in reason, which by its own logic does the work determining cause and effect. Our study is guided “by neither the teleology of truth nor the rational sequence of causes” (xi). Further, we are instructed to do without the methods of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, which together constitute a “monologue of reason about madness” (xi) takes the schism as already effected (x). The fully medicalized discourse of psychiatry is the end of a long exchange between reason and madness. The dawn of psychiatry marks the silence of this stammering dialogue. The aim of Foucault’s history will be to locate and discover the origin of that silence (xi).

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Foucault’s history of madness begins, or is rather preceded, with the curiosity of leprosy. Leprosy disappeared from Europe at the end of the Middle Ages,¹ leaving as many as 19,000 leprosariums utterly vacant throughout all of Christendom. The question of how to make use of this physical infrastructure of confinement was of great practical concern to institutions of the state and church. However the seclusion of the lepers served much less an epidemiological requirement, and much more a spiritual requirement. The leper’s existence was “a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign of both His anger and His grace” (6). The leper existed as a sign made meaningful through religious ritual. Through a process of exclusion the leper was “inscribed within a sacred circle”. As living manifestation of God’s punishment, the lepers were held in “inverse exaltation” (6), a hell on earth diametrically opposed to the salvation afforded by God. Furthermore, by an enacting this rite of exclusion, the lepers “accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion” (7). The lepers achieve salvation not through good works, but through their confinement in opposition to God. This “sacred distance” between leper and priest, Evil and God, is necessary not only in identifying the leper, but more so, to define a good, Christian, Godly subjectivity to which it exists in opposition. The to the physical infrastructure of the laprosarium was not the only relic that would endure following the disappearance of leprosy; the socio-psychic requirement that necessitated confinement would also persist. In satisfying this requirement, the social ritual applied to leprosy would also persist and be applied to madness, namely, “social exclusion but spiritual reintegration” (7).

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The rituals that arose in reaction to the leper would continue in new forms throughout and after the rebirth of Europe. Underlying such rites was a spiritual disquiet, a fear always needing to be kept at bay; excluded, controlled, ridiculed. This fear is of nihilism—a world without meaning, devoid of God and consumed by nothingness. As Foucault’s history will make plain, the maintenance of this antagonism between nonbeing and Being, evil and Good, madness and Reason will be of crucial ontological importance to the European subject. This great anxiety supplies the energy pushing the dialectic of madness forward.. ²Each new epoch engenders new requirements resolved only by a further act of turning upon the same anxiety (16). This operation of torsion—like a screw which with each twist becomes more forcibly lodged in its object—increases in its power over time becoming less and less a physical rite to be performed, and increasingly an operation of the unconscious.³

Exclusion results from a necessity to solve the socio-psychic requirements of the European subject. The fear of death—when life is decays into nothingness—occupies central concern. The leper is “as a living man, the very presence of death” (294, note IV); his exclusion establishes a legible boundary: between living souls, those allowed within the church walls, and dead souls, the lepers forced to take communion outside the church walls. By cathecting the leper with death, the souls of Europe can rest easy knowing they are among the living, as they are defined in opposition to the dead, excluded lepers.

While the lepers disappear, the great anxiety remains and needs a new object to invest its energy. Again obviating the threat posed by the existential threat of death, death is made “an object of derision by giving it an everyday tamed form, by constantly renewing it in the spectacle of life, by scattering it throughout the vices, the difficulties, and the absurdities of all men” (16). Madmen are chosen as the new embodiment of death whose ridicule is necessary to confirm the vitality and meaning of us good Europeans. Madness is elevated to the cardinal vice. Bosch’s painting, depicting, among other things, sins of heresy, lust, gluttony, and above all foolishness, affirms that “the absolute privilege of Folly is to rule over whatever is bad in man” (24). (Already in Bosch we see the theme of prodigality, which will be integral to the next mode of exclusion.) The writings of Cervantes and Shakespeare testify to the centrality of madness, with Folly’s responsibility in restoring the order of reason. Whether appearing at the denouement or provide the aporia driving forward the narrative, the literary imagination of the Renaissance necessitates Folly to play as chimera, which once unmasked, induces a sigh of resolution, restoring cosmos.

The dawn of the Renaissance is christened by the ubiquitous narratives and stories of a ship of fools. Madmen existed as vagabonds, roaming from town to town as residents forcibly chased them outside the limits of the city like vermin. The wandering continued until the insane were entrusted to merchants or pilgrims, embarking them as mindless cargo aboard their vessel. However, unlike the pilgrims and nautical traders who have clear purpose and destination, the madman has no such rational voyage. He is the passenger par excellence, a prisoner held in suspension between two countries, having no country of the spirit to call his own. Literally ungrounded, the madman is home, in that dangerous in-between place of uncertainty after the journey has begun, but before ever reaching any resolution. Once again, with the exclusion of the madman comes his spiritual reintegration. As madmen join the sea in search of their reason, the water acts as a purifying force that baptizes drifting souls.