through this grille is passed their food and the straw on which they sleep; by means of rakes, part of the filth that surrounds them is cleaned out." At the hospital of Nantes,
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the menagerie appears to consist of individual cages for wild beasts. Never had Esquirol seen "such an extravagance of locks, of bolts, of iron bars to shut the doors of the cells. . . . Tiny openings pierced next to the doors were fitted with iron bars and shutters. Quite close to this opening hung a chain fastened to the wall and bearing at its end a cast-iron receptacle, somewhat resembling a wooden shoe, in which food was placed and passed through the bars of these openings." When Francois-Emmanuel Fodere arrived at the hospital of Strasbourg in 1814, he found a kind of human stable, constructed with great care and skill: "for troublesome madmen and those who dirtied themselves, a kind of cage, or wooden closet, which could at the most contain one man of middle height, had been devised at the ends of the great wards." These cages had gratings for floors, and did not rest on the ground but were raised about fifteen centimeters. Over these gratings was thrown a little straw "upon which the madman lay, naked or nearly so, took his meals, and deposited his excrement."
This, to be sure, is a whole security system against the violence of the insane and the explosion of their fury. Such outbursts are regarded chiefly as a social danger. But what is most important is that it is conceived in terms of an animal freedom. The negative fact that "the madman is not treated like a human being" has a very positive content: this inhuman indifference actually has an obsessional value: it is rooted in the old fears which since antiquity, and especially since the Middle Ages, have given the animal world its familiar strangeness, its menacing marvels, its entire weight of dumb anxiety. Yet this animal fear which accompanies, with all its imaginary landscape, the perception of madness, no longer has the same meaning it had two or three centuries earlier: animal metamorphosis is no longer the visible sign of infernal powers, nor the result of a diabolic alchemy of unreason. The animal in man no longer
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has any value as the sign of a Beyond; it has become his madness, without relation to anything but itself: his madness in the state of nature. The animality that rages in madness dispossesses man of what is specifically human in him; not in order to deliver him over to other powers, but simply to establish him at the zero degree of his own nature. For classicism, madness in its ultimate form is man in immediate relation to his animality, without other reference, without any recourse.
The day would come when from an evolutionary perspective this presence of animality in madness would be considered as the sign—indeed, as the very essence—of disease. In the classical period, on the contrary, it manifested the very fact that the madman was not a sick man. Animality, in fact, protected the lunatic from whatever might be fragile, precarious, or sickly in man. The animal solidity of madness, and that density it borrows from the blind world of beasts, inured the madman to hunger, heat, cold, pain. It was common knowledge until the end of the eighteenth century that the insane could support the miseries of existence indefinitely. There was no need to protect them; they had no need to be covered or warmed. When, in 1811, Samuel Tuke visited a workhouse in the Southern Counties, he saw cells where the daylight passed through little barred windows that had been cut in the doors. All the women were entirely naked. Now "the temperature was extremely rigorous, and the evening of the day before, the thermometer had indicated a cold of 18 degrees. One of these unfortunate women was lying on a little straw, without covering." This ability of the insane to endure, like animals, the worst inclemencies was still a medical dogma for Pinel; he would always admire "the constancy and the ease with which certain of the insane of both sexes bear the most rigorous and prolonged cold. In the month of Nivose of the Year III, on certain days when the ther-
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mometer indicated 10, 11, and as many as 16 degrees below freezing, a madman in the hospital of Bicetre could not endure his wool blanket, and remained sitting on the icy floor of his cell. In the morning, one no sooner opened his door than he ran in his shirt into the inner court, taking ice and snow by the fistful, applying it to his breast and letting it melt with a sort of delectation." Madness, insofar as it partook of animal ferocity, preserved man from the dangers of disease; it afforded him an invulnerability, similar to that which nature, in its foresight, had provided for animals. Curiously, the disturbance of his reason restored the madman to the immediate kindness of nature by a return to animality.
This is why, at this extreme point, madness was less than ever linked to medicine; nor could it be linked to the domain of correction. Unchained animality could be mastered only by discipline and brutalizing. The theme of the animal-madman was effectively realized in the eighteenth century, in occasional attempts to impose a certain pedagogy on the insane. Pinel cites the case of a "very famous monastic establishment, in one of the southern regions of France," where a violent madman would be given "a precise order to change"; if he refused to go to bed or to eat, he "was warned that obstinacy in his deviations would be punished on the next day with ten strokes of the bullwhip." If, on the contrary, he was submissive and docile, he was allowed "to take his meals in the refectory, next to the disciplinarian," but at the least transgression, he was instantly admonished by a "heavy blow of a rod across his fingers." Thus, by the use of a curious dialectic whose movement explains all these "inhuman" practices of confinement, the free animality of madness was tamed only by such discipline whose meaning was not to raise the bestial to the human, but to restore man to what was purely animal within him. Madness discloses a secret of animality which is
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its own truth, and in which, in some way, it is reabsorbed. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, a fanner in the north of Scotland had his hour of fame. He was said to possess the art of curing insanity. Pinel notes in passing that this Gregory had the physique of a Hercules: "His method consisted in forcing the insane to perform the most difficult tasks of farming, in using them as beasts of burden, as servants, in reducing them to an ultimate obedience with a barrage of blows at the least act of revolt." In the reduction to animality, madness finds both its truth and its cure; when the madman has become a beast, this presence of the animal in man, a presence which constituted the scandal of madness, is eliminated: not that the animal is silenced, but man himself is abolished. In the human being who has become a beast of burden, the absence of reason follows wisdom and its order: madness is then cured, since it is alienated in something which is no less than its truth.
A moment would come when, from this animality of madness, would be deduced the idea of a mechanistic psychology, and the notion that the forms of madness can be referred to the great structures of animal life. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the animality that lends its face to madness in no way stipulates a determinist nature for its phenomena. On the contrary, it locates madness in an area of unforeseeable freedom where frenzy is unchained; if determinism can have any effect on it, it is in the form of constraint, punishment, or discipline. Through animality, madness does not join the great laws of nature and of life, but rather the thousand forms of a bestiary. But unlike the one popular in the Middle Ages, which illustrated, in so many symbolic visages, the metamorphoses of evil, this was an abstract bestiary; here evil no longer assumed its fantastic body; here we apprehend only its most extreme form, the truth of the beast which is a truth without content. Evil is freed from all that its wealth of icono-
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graphic fauna could do, to preserve only a general power of intimidation: the secret danger of an animality that lies in wait and, all at once, undoes reason in violence and truth in the madman's frenzy. Despite the contemporary effort to constitute a positivist zoology, this obsession with an animality perceived as the natural locus of madness continued to people the hell of the classical age. It was this obsession that created the imagery responsible
for all the practices of confinement and the strangest aspects of its savagery.
It has doubtless been essential to Western culture to link, as it has done, its perception of madness to the iconographic forms of the relation of man to beast. From the start, Western culture has not considered it evident that animals participate in the plenitude of nature, in its wisdom and its order: this idea was a late one and long remained on the surface of culture; perhaps it has not yet penetrated very deeply into the subterranean regions of the imagination. In fact, on close examination, it becomes evident that the animal belongs rather to an anti-nature, to a negativity that threatens order and by its frenzy endangers the positive wisdom of nature. The work of Lautreamont bears witness to this. Why should the fact that Western man has lived for two thousand years on his definition as a rational animal necessarily mean that he has recognized the possibility of an order common to reason and to animality? Why should he have necessarily designated, by this definition, the way in which he inserts himself in natural positivity? Independently of what Aristotle really meant, may we not assume that for the West this "rational animal" has long been the measure of the way in which reason's freedom functioned in the locus of unreason, diverging from it until it constituted its opposite term? From the moment philosophy became anthropology, and man sought to recognize himself in a natural plenitude, the animal lost its power of negativity, in order to become, between the determinism of nature
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and the reason of man, the positive form of an evolution. The formula of the "rational animal" has utterly changed its meaning: the unreason it suggested as the origin of all possible reason has entirely disappeared. Henceforth madness must obey the determinism of man perceived as a natural being in his very animality. In the classical age, if it is true that the scientific and medical analysis of madness, as we shall see below, sought to establish it within this natural mechanism, the real practices that concern the insane bear sufficient witness to the fact that madness was still contained in the anti-natural violence of animality.
In any case, it was this animality of madness which confinement glorified, at the same time that it sought to avoid the scandal inherent in the immorality of the unreasonable. Which reveals the distance established in the classical age between madness and the other forms of unreason, even if it is true that from a certain point of view they had been identified or assimilated. If a whole range of unreason was reduced to silence, but madness left free to speak the language of its scandal, what lesson could it teach which unreason as a whole was not capable of transmitting? What meaning had the frenzies and all the fury of the insane, which could not be found in the—probably more sensible—remarks of the other internees? In what respect then was madness more particularly significant?
Beginning with the seventeenth century, unreason in the most general sense no longer had much instructive value. That perilous reversibility of reason which was still so close for the Renaissance was to be forgotten, and its scandals were to disappear. The great theme of the madness of the Cross, which belonged so intimately to the Christian experience of the Renaissance, began to disappear in the seventeenth century, despite Jansenism and Pascal. Or rather, it subsisted, but changed and somehow inverted its meaning.
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It was no longer a matter of requiring human reason to abandon its pride and its certainties in order to lose itself in the great unreason of sacrifice. When classical Christianity speaks of the madness of the Cross, it is merely to humiliate false reason and add luster to the eternal light of truth; the madness of God-in-man's-image is simply a wisdom not recognized by the men of unreason who live in this world: "Jesus crucified . . . was the scandal of the world and appeared as nothing but ignorance and madness to the eyes of his time." But the fact that the world has become Christian, and that the order of God is revealed through the meander-ings of history and the madness of men, now suffices to show that "Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom."9 The scandal of Christian faith and Christian abasement, whose strength and value as revelation Pascal still preserved, would soon have no more meaning for Christian thought except perhaps to reveal in these scandalized consciences so many blind souls: "Do not permit your Cross, which has subdued the universe for you, to be still the madness and scandal of proud minds." Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that had become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries—until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche—for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason.
But at the very moment Christian reason rid itself of the madness that had so long been a part of itself, the madman, in his abolished reason, in the fury of his animality, received a singular power as a demonstration: it was as if scandal, driven out of that superhuman region where it related to God and where the Incarnation was manifested, reappeared, in the plenitude of its force and pregnant with a new lesson, in that region where man has a relation to na-
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ture and to his animality. The lesson's point of application has shifted to the lower regions of madness. The Cross is no longer to be considered in its scandal; but it must not be forgotten that throughout his human life Christ honored madness, sanctified it as he sanctified infirmity cured, sin forgiven, poverty assured of eternal riches. Saint Vincent de Paul reminds those assigned to tend the mad within the houses of confinement that their "rule in this is Our Lord who chose to be surrounded by lunatics, demoniacs, madmen, the tempted and the possessed." These men ruled by the powers of the inhuman constitute, around those who represent eternal Wisdom, around the Man who incarnates it, a perpetual occasion for glorification: because they glorify, by surrounding it, the wisdom that has been denied them, and at the same time give it a pretext to humiliate itself, to acknowledge that it is granted only by grace. Further: Christ did not merely choose to be surrounded by lunatics; he himself chose to pass in their eyes for a madman, thus experiencing, in his incarnation, all the sufferings of human misfortune. Madness thus became the ultimate form, the final degree of God in man's image, before the fulfillment and deliverance of the Cross: "0 my Savior, you were pleased to be a scandal to the Jews, and a madness to the Gentiles; you were pleased to seem out of your senses, as it is reported in the Holy Gospel that it was thought of Our Lord that he had gone mad. Dicebant quoniam in furorem versus est. His Apostles sometimes looked upon him as a man in anger, and he seemed such to them, so that they should bear witness that he had bome with all our infirmities and all our states of affliction, and to teach them and us as well to have compassion upon those who fall into these infirmities."10 Coming into this world, Christ agreed to take upon himself all the signs of the human condition and the very stigmata of fallen nature; from poverty to
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death, he followed the long road of the Passion, which was also the road of the passions, of wisdom forgotten, and of madness. And because it was one of the forms of the Passion—the ultimate form, in a sense, before death—madness would now become, for those who suffered it, an object of respect and compassion.
To respect madness is not to interpret it as the involuntary and inevitable accident of disease, but to recognize this lower limit of human truth, a limit not accidental but essential. As death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, madness is its limit in the realm of animality, and just as death had been sanctified by the death of Christ, madness, in its most bestial nature, had also been sanctified. On March 29, 1654, Saint Vincent de Paul announced to Jean Barreau, himself a congreganist, that his brother had just been confined at Saint-Lazare as a lunatic: "We must honor Our Lord in the state wherein He was when they sought to bind Him, saying quoniam in frenesim versus est, in order to sanctify that state in those whom His Divine Providence has placed there."11 Madness is the lowest point of humanity to which
God submitted in His incarnation, thereby showing that there was nothing inhuman in man that could not be redeemed and saved; the ultimate point of the Fall was glorified by the divine presence: and it is this lesson which, for the seventeenth century, all madness still taught.
We see why the scandal of madness could be exalted, while that of the other forms of unreason was concealed with so much care. The scandal of unreason produced only the contagious example of transgression and immorality;
the scandal of madness showed men how close to animality their Fall could bring them; and at the same time how far divine mercy could extend when it consented to save man. For Renaissance Christianity, the entire instructive value of
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unreason and of its scandals lay in the madness of the Incarnation of God in man. For classicism, the Incarnation is no longer madness; but what is madness is this incarnation of man in the beast, which is, as the ultimate point of his Fall, the most manifest sign of his guilt; and, as the ultimate object of divine mercy, the symbol of universal forgiveness and innocence regained. Henceforth, all the lessons of madness and the power of its instruction must be sought in this obscure region, at the lower confines of humanity, where man is hinged to nature, where he is both ultimate downfall and absolute innocence. Does not the Church's solicitude for the insane during the classical period, as it is symbolized in Saint Vincent de Paul and his Congregation, or in the Brothers of Charity, all those religious orders hovering over madness and showing it to the world—does this not indicate that the Church found in madness a difficult but an essential lesson: the guilty innocence of the animal in man? This is the lesson to be read and understood in its spectacles, in which it exalted in the madman the fury of the human beast. Paradoxically, this Christian consciousness of animality prepared the moment when madness would be treated as a fact of nature; it would then be quickly forgotten what this "nature" meant for classical thought: not the always accessible domain of an objective analysis, but that region in which there appears, for man, the always possible scandal of a madness that is both his ultimate truth and the form of his abolition.
Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness) Page 9