Foucault on Negativity, Violence and Myth

Foucault Studies, 2008

International Journal on Humanistic Ideology, 2024

The article contains a detailed outline of the Foucault-Derrida debate about the Cartesian cogito and the history of madness. The first part offers an in-depth analysis of the expression ‘madness itself’ and questions the prospect of the Foucauldian project as a whole but also highlights a certain inflationary tendency in Derrida’s critique of it. The article ultimately argues that the debate is centered around a series of vigorous yet fruitful misreadings which create a vast field of discussion where contemporary research can find valuable resources. The article paves the way toward the numerous perspectives which the debate has generated, which range from new forms of listening to madness to the redefinition of our medical and philosophical understanding of madness.

Unreason: all that, for reason, is closest and most remote, emptiest and most complete; all that presents itself to reason in familiar structures-authorizing a knowledge, and then a science, which seeks to be positive-and all that is constantly in retreat from reason, in the inaccessible domain of nothingness.

2020

Madness and Literature The role of madness has been an unexcavated part in studies of Foucault on transgression, especially with literary studies. This paper considers madness as the presence of transgression, and gives an account of madness from two different perspectives: tragic experience and critical consciousness. Madness as a tragic experience provides Foucault a way of transgressing death which is a limit that cannot be transcended; madness as a critical consciousness helps Foucault conceptualize the relation between reason and madness. The image of madmen in literary works can be recognized as the most typical embodiment of the connection between madness and transgression. Rather than aiming at a detailed explanation of Foucault’s understanding of madness, it attaches vital importance that how madness as a tragic experience and a critical consciousness becomes the presence of transgression.

Review of: Philippe Artières, Jean ‐ François Bert, Un succès philosophique: L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, IMEC, 2011); and Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1961 ‐ 2011 , Textes choisis et présentés par Philippe Artières, Jean ‐ François Bert, Philippe Cheval ‐ lier, Frédéric Gros, Luca Paltrinieri, Judith Revel, Mathieu Potte ‐ Bonneville et Martin Saar, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, IMEC, 2011).

Michel Foucault sees the history of madness as simultaneously a history of the mad and the history of reasoned discourse to understand and control the mad ("to make madness speak"). Therefore, Foucault's History of Madness is not simply a history of ideas about the mad (although it is that, to a certain extent). In addition, Foucault's history presents a history of practices that bear upon the mad: practices of confinement and, later, treatment. But how does reason comprehend madness? Foucault relies upon the writings of René Descartes, among others, to answer this question. Descartes sees madness and animality as intrinsically linked, for both must be strictly demarcated from reason if we are to have a clear conception of the human. As a result, the concepts of madness and animality are left indeterminate, clearly distinct from reason but obscurely equivocal with respect to one another. Foucault traces this event at the level of ideas by tracing the impact of Cartesian thought and at the level of practices of confinement. This demarcation of the ideas and practices of reason from ideas and practices of madness and animality in Foucault's text provide the basis for the initial section of my essay.

Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida, 2017

Madness as the Absence of (an) Oeuvre 'Madness is the absence of an oeuvre' is one of Foucault's most ambiguous enunciations. He first discusses this idea in the final pages of History of Madness, in the chapter 'The Anthropological Circle', and in more detail, yet not necessarily more clearly, in the essay which appeared three years after History of Madness and is attached as an Appendix to the 1972 edition of History of Madness, entitled 'Madness, the Absence of an OEuvre'. This idea presents Foucault's reader with a degree of ambiguity for four reasons: firstly, Foucault never develops a fully articulated explanation or justification of his quasi-aphoristic argument; secondly, this idea relies heavily on ideas and concepts of others previously stated, which Foucault does not acknowledge, thus no background for the reading of his argument is provided; thirdly, Foucault oscillates between different concepts of the term 'oeuvre'; and fourthly this aphorism, which is eventually about the break between madness and work, demands to be read alongside a contradictory idea, namely the 'proximity between madness and literature' (Foucault 2010: 548). In my attempt to read this argument, therefore, I will: (a) provide a background context by briefly 10 Foucault and Madness

2013

One of the fundamental issues in 20 th century philosophy is of the nature of individual subjective experience. I seek to show how this "nature" is revealed and hidden by a historical process outlined in History of Madness by Michel Foucault. Foucault's philosophical and anthropological engagement with the experience of madness in The Modern Age functions as a useful tool towards this end. The psychologisation and medicalization of madness in the 19 th century allowed for an endless discourse on madness. This in turn permitted the language of the mad to burst open from its silence, historically present since the Great Confinement. This language of madness expressed itself poetically and artistically, thus revealing the paradoxical essence of the nature of human subjectivity as well as the particularity of its expression in the Modern Period. This particularity is elucidated from a genealogical account of the births of subjectivity and objectivity. I proceed to use this genealogy in conjunction with the language of madness to posit a prescriptive theory for aesthetic engagement. The essay seeks to show how the aesthetic experience can aid in the affirmation of the individual's modern subjective reality. Thusly, the "goal" of the essay is to reveal affirmation, i.e., amor fati, the love of fate.

Ethos, 2007

I consider how Michel Foucault avoids trauma and tragedy while emphasizing power and discourse in his study of a 19th-century matricide in the Normandy countryside. Drawing on Jonathan Lear's discussion of knowingness, I show how Foucault misreads tragic drama as well as psychoanalysis to emphasize power, pleasure, and discourse. While seeming to acknowledge tragedy, his emphasis on will to power, violent madness, and male agonism more closely resembles Homeric epic. The attempts to displace psychoanalysis and refigure tragedy, however, are unconvincing, even self-defeating. Ironically, Foucault makes an inadvertent argument for psychoanalysis and tragedy and, thus, psychoanalytic anthropology. [Foucault, matricide, death drive, tragedy, Orestes] The question may be raised whether the Epic or Tragic Mode of imitation is the higher. -Aristotle, Poetics Thanks in no small measure to Michel Foucault's remarkable influence, psychoanalysis is out of fashion in anthropology, and so too are social dialectic and social symbolism. Promoted is a view of social life that resembles Homeric epic in which men compete for power and pleasure with words and weapons and without much psychological complexity. It is a view that differs from tragic drama, in which irrational passions result in suffering, often amid tensions between the domestic sphere and male politics and war. Given his hostility to psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that Foucault would prefer epical struggle