'Madness and Civilization' by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault pioneered a form of historiography which he called cultural archeology and as with the standard form such of any technique it is thorough and rigorous, such that it produces a unique and brilliant criticism of subjects previously deemed mundane. ‘Madness and Civilization’ was Foucault’s first complete novel based on such a practice, it details the chorological progression of society’s relation with and too ‘mad’ people and the condition of ‘madness’. This begins with the seclusion of madness from within society, as it is firstly ostracized into travelling companies, moving on to become to stable communities in particular sections of a city, then to confinement and often imprisonment and finally the establishment of institutional asylums. In amongst are descriptions of different aspects of madness as well as its relation to doctors and the wider community.

Foucault illustrates that the reason the behind the increased aggression towards madness is a result of the dominance of rational thought, which was the defining feature of the enlightened gentleman. From this he develops the theory of madness as ‘dazzled reason’, in which ones reason is liberated, able to experience the freedom of nothingness, which dazzles and overwhelms rationality like a bright light. In this way madness becomes the ultimate existential subject, battling against the standardised bad faith of acceptable society in the search for truth, yet is denied transcendence through confinement and ultimately rendered to an eternity of non-being.

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‘To say that madness is dazzelment is to say that the madman sees the daylight, the same daylight as the man of reason (both live in the same brightness); but seeing this same daylight, and nothing but this daylight and nothing in it, he sees it as void, as night, as nothing; for him the shadows are the way to perceive daylight. Which means that, seeing the night and the nothingness of night, he dose not see at all. And believing he sees, he admits as realities the hallucinations of his imagination and all the multitudinous population of night. That is why delirium and dazzelment are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.’