Michel Foucault's History of Madness became available in unabridged translation and

[struggle4progress]

paperback this year -- and at a reasonable price for 700 pages of text, index, and bibliography. R/T seems as reasonable a place as any to notice this:

History of Madness
by Michel Foucault
Routledge, 725 pp.
“Is it not by locking up one’s neighbor that one convinces oneself of one’s own good sense.”
Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary
The epigraph above, used by Michel Foucault (1926-84) in his magisterial History of Madness, reveals his angle of entry into the subject. Not only does he recount the history of how we have understood or prejudiced, punished or treated madness, but deconstructs the idea of madness, and offers his own working understanding of the boundary lines which shift so uncertainly in all of us ... While Foucault’s scholarship is extensive, one feels that he is always coming from a place in the heart, a silent passion whereby the subject commands both fascination and necessity. He notes that the marginalization of social elements once took such form as the leprosaria where lepers were housed and castigated as God’s judged, and subsequently those having fallen into the venereal “sins,” but by the late Middle Ages, early Renaissance, the appearance of the Narrenshiff, the ship of fools, the outcasts who migrated from port to port on inland rivers, and were memorialized in the phantasmagoria of Bosch, Breughel, and Dürer. The operative metaphor of the ship of fools was of course that of the fragile bark of sanity cast loose upon tempestuous, tenebrous seas ... http://calitreview.com/247

History of Madness
Michel Foucault, History of Madness, Foreword by Ian Hacking, Jean Khalfa (ed.), Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (trans.), Routledge, 2006, 725pp., $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415277013.
Reviewed by Colin Gordon, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust
... this translation adds a number of its own errors. In a discussion of Christian attitudes to the poor, 'Dieu fait homme' is translated (407) as 'God-made man' -- turning a reference to the Incarnation into one to the Creation; the phrase 'un ordre dispersé' -- referring to the heterogeneous and fragmentary modes of the experience of madness in the West, and in the Enlightenment period in particular -- is translated as 'a random order' (163). The landed property of French leper-houses becomes a 'land bank' (4). 'Toujours' is translated as 'always' where it means 'still' (131), 'dénoncé' as 'denounced' (344, 345) where it means 'betrayed', and 'aliénés' as 'alienated' (498 and elsewhere) where it means 'lunatic' or 'insane'. Mistakes are even added which Howard avoided: 'résurrections imaginaires' cannot, unfortunately, be translated as 'imaginary resurrections' (363); Howard has here the serviceable rendering 'iconographic resurrections': Foucault is talking about the recurrence of similar motifs in the imaginations of different epochs ... Histoire de la Folie has been a book which captures and interacts with powerful historical forces, in ways and with effects which (as Foucault was to remark on his 1972 preface) elude any sovereign authorial intention. One of those forces, still embryonic in 1961, was antipsychiatry. Another was a factor which Foucault said he grasped only much later, that a work with critical implications for psychiatry could be interpreted in some progressive quarters as an attack on the Soviet Union; though there are already indications in 1961 that Foucault could have anticipated objections from these quarters, where he notes (604, n2) that Marxist historians are 'curiously' close in their methods to corporate histories of psychiatry which present harmonious accounts of the unity of social and scientific progress. These ambiguities signalled by Foucault in the notion of asylum are echoed in the epigraph of the second chapter of Foucault's book, 'The Great Internment': 'Compelle intrare' -- a phrase from St Luke's gospel (14:23, 'Go out on to the highways and along the hedgerows and make them come in, so that my house may be filled'), which had been used by St Augustine to justify the Church's right to coerce schismatics and heretics, and was the issue, in the late-17th century period critical to Foucault's study, of debate between Bayle and Bossuet, among others, over the justification of religious tolerance. While sceptical philosophy, Foucault's epigraph implies, fights the Enlightenment battle for liberty of conscience and belief, heresy is elsewhere being transferred from ecclesiastical jurisdiction and recategorised as one of the symptoms of a disordered life, and sanctioned as such by correctional internment -- albeit often in ecclesiastical institutions where techniques of spiritual pastoral and penitence remained an active component. Reason could be an enforceable orthodoxy; reason was normative, and in due course would become normality ... Histoire de la Folie is the work of a young genius, a work of masterful accomplishment and prodigious and prodigal energy, grasp and daring. No richer, more multidimensional work of cultural and intellectual history has been written ... http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=8904

A Re-examination of Foucault's History of Madness
An exploration of Foucault's Mad World
... Since Christianity, madness had still been regarded as an extrinsic part of man while paradoxically being configured as an inseparable and unprejudiced element of human experience, synonymous with the passion, religious ecstasy, and ultimately with the Divine. And yet madness was a product of the search for something, somewhere ‘out there’ not existing in man per se but of a divine providence and as an objective of spiritual enquiry. Madness was more of a blessing. Bestowed upon a person as a result of a profound search – a key feature which manifests itself in the age-old tradition of the fool. The fool was regarded as a paragon of one who was searching for his sanity and to redeem his or her spiritual self as extolled in the classic text of the period that Foucault refers, Sebastian Brant's, Das Narrenschiff (1494)(1). In this satire the fools depart in ships to search for the promised land of Narragonia. What this entails is not so much a conceptualization of madness than a re-orientation of its objective position. The fools were not perceived as abnormal or insane but rather as part of the evolution of the human subject. The journey of the madman was an alteration of a normative state. Its social and cultural value was seen as positive and even beneficial. However, the source of this state was external and not what would become later on a subject of objective scientific scrutiny or a product of a particular form of ‘special’ knowledge. Thus, far beyond this paradigm during the advent of scientific positivism this all changed. The Ship of Fools was seen once and for all to sail over the horizon never to return, an indication of a loss of a certain kind of positive tradition and a harbinger of the social and cultural changes that would ensue. Subsequently, changes in the structure of knowledge would cause a departure from this medieval concept of madness, and it is from this point we encounter the first phase of Foucault’s history of madness in the chapter Stulifera Navis (Ship of Fools) ... Whilst the Middle Ages had become dominated by an array of very grim literary and artistic apocalyptic visions dominated by the very real theme of death, plague and leprosy, it appeared as though man had been abandoned by God and out of this abandonment a new mythology began to emerge. A space created for a new kind discourse, which would take up the empty residences of the vacant Lazar houses and Leprosariums, these vestiges that once housed God's blessed cursed. So Foucault accords these physical spaces vacant and viable for the potential formation of a new scourge and punishment by God. But what scourge? He suggests that this space needed to be filled. The new scourge was not birthed from a physical or organic state or even a developing discourse - the axis from which Foucault’s work operates - because ‘madness’ did not exist in this sense. Madness only existed out of a provision arising slowly from the relationship of Christian-held notions that formed a dialogue between reason and unreason. This emerging condition, that was not yet madness as we see it today, was to be seen as something to fear in place of death, a sublimation of madness above death as a ‘senseless unreason’, emerging insidiously from the same: “dark kingdom…which linked madness to the powerful tragic forces that controlled the world” (HM: 22). If one could not control death then one would control something far more dreadful than it, for what could be more terrifying than death other than a life lived as a madman who had lost all sense of reason and hope and could quite possibly lose his soul in the process ... http://knol.google.com/k/a-re-examination-of-foucault-s-history-of-madness#

[Jim__]

1. Have you read this book?

I am curious because I have recently read Derrida's Writing and Difference and chapter 2, Cogito and the History of Madness - section 2 under contents, is on this book:

My main departure might appear slight and artificial. In this 673 page book Michel Foucault devotes three pages - and, moreover, in a kind of prologue to his second chapter - to a certain pasage from the first of Descartes's Meditations. In this passage madness, folly, dementia, insanity seem, I emphasize seem, dismissed, excluded, and ostracized from the circle of philosophical dignity, denied entry to the philosopher's city, denied the right to philosophical consideration, ordered away from the bench as soon as summoned to it by Descartes - this last tribunal of a Cogito that, by its essence, could not possibly be mad.

In alleging - correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined - that the sense of Foucault's entire project can be pinpointed in these few elusive and somewhat enigmatic pages, and that the reading of the Descartes and the Cartesian Cogito proposed to us engages in its problematic the totality of this History of Madness as regards both its intention and its feasibility, I shall therefore be asking myself, in two series of questions, the following:

The questions that he has, IIRC, deal with Foucault's interpretation of Descartes's Cogito and especially with Foucault's take on Descartes's mention of madness in his meditation. Derrida thinks he gets this wrong.

The second question deals with Foucault's writing. Derrida claims that Foucault is not describing madness from a "reasonable" perspective, but rather from the perspective of madness itself; and he questions whether an non-mad person can actually do this.

I was planning on reading this book to see if Derrida's take is reasonable. If you have read this book, I am curious as to whether you think it is or not.

[struggle4progress]

3. I read some Foucault in the mid-80s and a bit more about a decade later, but

not the then-available abridgement of this work. I just bought History of Madness earlier this week and haven't progressed much into it: so far, I'm learning something from almost every sentence

[Jim__]

4. OK. Thanks.

[Boojatta]

2. "a work with critical implications for psychiatry could be interpreted...

in some progressive quarters as an attack on the Soviet Union"

That requires a rather loose interpretation of the phrase "progressive quarters." Yes, I know that you didn't choose the phrase.