Madness and Civilization

• Publisher ‏       : ‎ Routledge Classics; Edition (1 January 2016)
• Language ‏       : ‎ English
• ISBN-        ‏      : ‎ 9780415253857
• Item Weight  ‏ : ‎ 300 g
• Dimensions ‏   : ‎ 20.3 x 25.4 x 4.7 cm
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India

INTRODUCTION

Madness has in our age become some sort of lost truth. Truth, perhaps, is not so much a matter of coherence of related meanings, and it is certainly not a simplistic conjunction of pseudo-fact and pseudo-experience. With equal certainty it is not a self-mystifying lexicographical search for a meaning that essentially eludes itself.

Madness, as Foucault makes so impressively clear in this remarkable book, is a way of seizing in extremis the racinating groundwork of the truth that underlies our more specific realiza- tions of what we are about. The truth of madness is what mad- ness is. What madness is is a form of vision that destroys itself by its own choice of oblivion in the face of existing forms of social tactics and strategy. Madness, for instance, is a matter of voicing the realization that I am (or you are) Christ. There are many available forms of crucifixion in our age; apart from the cross, there are the shock box and the operation of leucotomy, as well as the mass of tranquillizing drugs that flood the ready market of well-trained but gullible psychiatrists. The sacrificial offering

becomes some sort of definable and measurable social fact. But that is not all. By implication we all become this sort of fact that denies our core-essentiality and reduces us to a co-essentiality of abstract absences.

Foucault knows very well and expresses with erudition and stylistic power’ the nature of the violence that mental patients meet. He portrays the devastation that has been brought about in the immense area of mad, or supposedly mad, experience and behaviour by the deforming influence of a pseudo-medical per spective. Foucault makes it quite clear that the invention of mad- ness as a disease is in fact nothing less than a peculiar disease of our civilization. We choose to conjure up this disease in order to evade a certain moment of our own existence the moment of disturbance, of penetrating vision into the depths of ourselves, that we prefer to externalize into others. Others are elected to live out the chaos that we refuse to confront in ourselves. By this means we escape a certain anxiety, but only at a price that is as immense as it is unrecognized.

Recent psychiatric or perhaps anti-psychiatric-research into the origins of the major form of madness in our age. schizophrenia, has moved round to the position that people do not in fact go mad, but are driven mad by others who are driven into the position of driving them mad by a peculiar convergence of social pressures. These social pressures, hinted at by Foucault, are mediated to certain selected individuals by their families- themselves selected by processes that are intelligible through various mystifying and confusing manoeuvres.

Table of Essic account of madness, Mich hed European philosophers sinc pucault

These man oeuvres have a cultural and historical significance that has long eluded us; they are apprehended by Foucault,ness and Cory of Insanity in