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velopments of sleep—with what they contribute at each stage to the quality of the imagination—and the forms of madness, the analogy is constant, because the mechanisms are the same: the same movement of vapors and spirits, the same liberation of images, the same correspondence between the physical qualities of phenomena and the psychological or moral values of sentiments. "To emerge from the insane no differently than from the sleeping."16
The important thing, in Zacchias's analysis, is that madness is not associated with dreams in their positive phenomena, but rather to the totality formed by sleep and dreams together: that is, to a complex which includes—besides the image—hallucination, memory, or prediction, the great void of sleep, the night of the senses, and all that negativity which wrests man from the waking state and its apparent truths. Whereas tradition compared the delirium of the madman to the vivacity of the dream images, the classical period identified delirium only with the complex of the image and the night of the mind, against which background it assumed its liberty. And this complex, transposed entire into the clarity of the waking state, constituted madness. This is how we must understand the definitions of madness which insistently recur throughout the classical period. The dream, as a complex figure of image and sleep, is almost always present in that definition. Either in a negative fashion—the notion of the waking state then being the only one that distinguishes madmen from sleepers; or in a positive fashion, delirium being defined as a modality of the dream, with the waking state as the specific difference:
"Delirium is the dream of waking persons."17 The ancients' notion of the dream as a transitory form of madness is inverted; it is no longer the dream which borrows its disturbing powers from alienation—showing thereby how fragile or limited reason is; it is madness which takes its original nature from the dream and reveals in this kinship
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that it is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality.
The dream deceives; it leads to confusions; it is illusory. But it is not erroneous. And that is why madness is not exhausted in the waking modality of the dream, and why it overflows into error. It is true that in the dream, the imagination forges "impossible things and miracles," or that it assembles lifelike figures "by an irrational method"; but, Zacchias remarks, "there is no error in these things, and consequently nothing insane." Madness occurs when the images, which are so close to the dream, receive the affirmation or negation that constitutes error. It is in this sense that the Encyclopedic proposed its famous definition of madness: to depart from reason "with confidence and in the firm conviction that one is following it—that, it seems to me, is what is called being mad." Error is the other element always present with the dream, in the classical definition of insanity. The madman, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is not so much the victim of an illusion, of a hallucination of his senses, or of a movement of his mind. He is not abused; he deceives himself. If it is true that on one hand the madman's mind is led on by the oneiric arbitrariness of images, on the other, and at the same time, he imprisons himself in the circle of an erroneous consciousness: "We call madmen," Sauvages was to say, "those who are actually deprived of reason or who persist in some notable error; it is this constant error of the soul manifest in its imagination, in its judgments, and in its desires, which constitutes the characteristic of this category."
Madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened. It is in this relation, at the same time as in the destruction of this relation, that madness assumes its general meaning and its particular forms. Dementia, Zacchias says, using the term here in the most general sense of madness, "lay in this, that the intellect did not
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distinguish true from false." But this breakdown, if we can understand it only as negation, has positive structures which give it singular forms. According to the different forms of access to the truth, there will be different types of madness. It is in this sense that Chrichton, for example, distinguishes in the order of vesanias, first the class deliria, which alter that relation to the truth which takes shape in perception ("general delirium of the mental faculties, in which the diseased perceptions are taken for realities"); then the class hallucinations, which alter representation ("error of the mind in which imaginary objects are taken for realities, or else real objects are falsely represented"); and last, the class dementias, which without abolishing or altering the faculties that afford access to truth, weaken them and diminish their powers.
But we can also analyze madness starting with truth itself and with the forms proper to it. It is in this manner that the Encyclopedic distinguishes "physical truth" from "moral truth." "Physical truth consists in the accurate relation of our sensations with physical objects"; there will be a form of madness determined by the impossibility of acceding to this form of truth; a kind of madness of the physical world which includes illusions, hallucinations, all perceptual disturbances; "it is a madness to hear choirs of angels, as certain enthusiasts do." "Moral truth," on the other hand, "consists in the exactitude of the relations we discern either between moral objects, or between those objects and ourselves." There will be a form of madness consisting of the loss of these relations; such is the madness of character, of conduct, and of the passions. "Veritable madnesses, then, are all the derangements of our mind, all the illusions of self-love, and all our passions when they are carried to the point of blindness; for blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness."18
Blindness: one of the words which comes closest to the
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essence of classical madness. It refers to that night of quasi-sleep which surrounds the images of madness, giving them, in their solitude, an invisible sovereignty; but it refers also to ill-founded beliefs, mistaken judgments, to that whole background of errors inseparable from madness. The fundamental discourse of delirium, in its constitutive powers, thus reveals to what extent, despite analogies of form, despite the rigor of its meaning, it was not a discourse of reason. It spoke, but in the night of blindness; it was more than the loose and disordered text of a dream, since it deceived itself; but it was more than an erroneous proposition, since it was plunged into that total obscurity which is that of sleep. Delirium, as the principle of madness, is a system of false propositions in the general syntax of the dream.
Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them. With error, madness shares non-truth, and arbitrariness in affirmation or negation; from the dream, madness borrows the flow of images and the colorful presence of hallucinations. But while error is merely non-truth, while the dream neither affirms nor judges, madness fills the void of error with images, and links hallucinations by affirmation of the false. In a sense, it is thus plenitude, joining to the figures of night the powers of day, to the forms of fantasy the activity of the waking mind; it links the dark content with the forms of light. But is not such plenitude actually the culmination of the void? The presence of images offers no more than night-ringed hallucinations, figures inscribed at the comers of sleep, hence detached from any sensuous reality; however vivid they are, however rigorously established in the body, these images are nothingness, since they represent nothing; as for
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erroneous judgment, it judges only in appearance: affirming nothing true or real, it does not affirm at all; it is ensnared in the non-being of error.
Joining vision and blindness, image and judgment, hallucination and language, sleep and waking, day and night, madness is ultimately nothing, for it unites in them all that is negative. But the paradox of this nothing is to manifest itself, to explode in signs, in words, in gestures. Inextricable unity of order and disorder, of the reasonable being of things and this nothingness of madness! For madness, if it is nothing, can manifest itself only by
departing from itself, by assuming an appearance in the order of reason and thus becoming the contrary of itself. Which illuminates the paradoxes of the classical experience: madness is always absent, in a perpetual retreat where it is inaccessible, without phenomenal or positive character; and yet it is present and perfectly visible in the singular evidence of the madman. Meaningless disorder as madness is, it reveals, when we examine it, only ordered classifications, rigorous mechanisms in soul and body, language articulated according to a visible logic. All that madness can say of itself is merely reason, though it is itself the negation of reason. In short, a rational hold over madness is always possible and necessary, to the very degree that madness is non-reason.
There is only one word which summarizes this experience, 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.
And if, now, we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations with the dream and with error, to clas-
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sical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Dazzlement is night in broad daylight, the darkness that rules at the very heart of what is excessive in light's radiance. Dazzled reason opens its eyes upon the sun and sees nothing, that is, does not see; in dazzlement, the recession of objects toward the depths of night has as an immediate correlative the suppression of vision itself; at the moment when it sees objects disappear into the secret night of light, sight sees itself in the moment of its disappearance.
To say that madness is dazzlement 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 the night, he does 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 dazzlement are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.
In this sense, the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, believes he sees when he imagines. In the uniform lucidity of his closed senses, Descartes has broken with all possible fascination, and if he sees, he is certain of seeing that which he sees. While before the eyes of the madman, drunk on a light which is darkness, rise and multi-
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ply images incapable of criticizing themselves (since the madman sees them), but irreparably separated from being (since the madman sees nothing).
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself. And this is not a metaphor. We are at the center of the great cosmology which animates all classical culture. The "cosmos" of the Renaissance, so rich in internal communications and symbolisms, entirely dominated by the interacting presence of the stars, has now disappeared, without "nature" having yet assumed its status of universality, without its having received man's lyrical recognition, subjecting him to the rhythm of its seasons. What the classical thinkers retain of the "world," what they already anticipate in "nature," is an extremely abstract law, which nonetheless forms the most vivid and concrete opposition, that of day and night. This is no longer the fatal time of the planets, it is not yet the lyrical time of the seasons; it is the universal but absolutely divided time of brightness and darkness. A form which thought entirely masters in a mathematical science—Cartesian physics is a kind of mathesis of light—but which at the same time traces the great tragic caesura in human existence: one that dominates the theatrical time of Racine and the space of Georges de la Tour in the same imperious fashion. The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most reduced but the most demanding of the world's necessities, the most inevitable but the simplest of nature's legalities.
A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism;
everything must be either waking or dream, truth or dark-
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ness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow. Such a law prescribes an inevitable order, a serene division which makes truth possible and confirms it forever.
And yet on either side of this order, two symmetrical, inverse figures bear witness that there are extremities where it can be transgressed, showing at the same time to what degree it is essential not to transgress it. On one side, tragedy. The rule of the theatrical day has a positive content; it forces tragic duration to be poised upon the singular but universal alternation of day and night; the whole of the tragedy must be accomplished in this unity of time, for tragedy is ultimately nothing but the confrontation of two realms, linked to each other by time itself, in the irreconcilable. Every day, in Racine's theater, is overhung by a night, which it brings, so to speak, to light: the night of Troy and its massacres, the night of Nero's desires, Titus's Roman night, Athalie's night. These are the great stretches of night, realms of darkness which haunt the day without yielding an hour, and disappear only in the new night of death. And these fantastic nights, in their turn, are haunted by a light which forms a kind of infernal reflection of the day: the burning of Troy, the torches of the Praetorians, the pale light of the dream. In classical tragedy, day and night are arranged like a pair of mirrors, endlessly reflect each other, and afford that simple couple a sudden profundity which envelops in a single movement all of man's life and his death. In the same fashion, in De la Tour's Madeleine au miroir, light and shadow confront each other, divide and at the same time unite a face and its reflection, a skull and its image, a vigil and a silence; and in the Image Saint-Alexis, the page holding the torch reveals under the shadow of the vault the man who was his master—a grave and luminous boy encounters all of human misery; a child brings death to light.
On the other side, facing tragedy and its hieratic lan-
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guage, is the confused murmur of madness. Here, too, the great law of the division has been violated; shadow and light mingle in the fury of madness, as in the tragic disorder. But in another mode. In night, the tragic character found a somber truth of day; the night of Troy remained Andromache's truth, as Athalie's night presaged the truth of the already advancing day; night, paradoxically, revealed; it was the profoundest day of being. The madman, conversely, finds in daylight only the inconsistency of the night's figures; he lets the light be darkened by all the illusions of the dream; his day is only the most superficial night of appearance. It is to this degree that tragic man, more than any other, is engaged in being, is the bearer of his truth, since, like Phedre, he flings in the face of the pitiless sun all the secrets of the night; while the madman is entirely excluded from being. And how could he not be, lending as he does the day's illusory reflection to the night's non-being?
We understand that the tragic hero—in contrast to the baroque character of the preceding period—can never be mad; and that conversely madness cannot bear within itself those values of tragedy, which we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical period, the man of tragedy and the man of madness confront each other, without a possible dialogue, without a common language; for the former can utter only the de
cisive words of being, uniting in a flash the truth of light and the depth of darkness; the latter endlessly drones out the indifferent murmur which cancels out both the day's chatter and the lying dark.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
And this much, which the archaeology of knowledge has been able to teach us bit by bit, was already offered to us in
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a simple tragic fulguration, in the last words of Andromaque.
As if, at the moment when madness was vanishing from the tragic act, at the moment when tragic man was to separate himself for over two centuries from the man of unreason—as if, at this very moment, an ultimate figuration were demanded of madness. The curtain which falls on the last scene of Andromaque also falls on the last of the great tragic incarnations of madness. But in this presence on the threshold of its own disappearance, in this madness incarcerating itself for good, is articulated what it is and will be for the entire classical age. Is it not precisely at the moment of its disappearance that it can best present its truth, its truth of absence, its truth which is that of day at the limits of night? This had to be the last scene of the first great classical tragedy; or if one prefers, the first time in which the classical truth of madness is expressed in a tragic movement which is the last of the preclassical theater. A truth, in any case, that is instantaneous, since its appearance can only be its disappearance; the lightning-flash is seen only in the already advancing night.
Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness) Page 12