Madness and Civilzation ( A History of Madness)

by Foucault, Michel -

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  The Goya of the Disparates and the Quinta del Sordo addresses himself to another madness. Not that of madmen cast into prison, but that of man cast into darkness. Does Goya not link us, by memory, with the old world of en­chantments, of fantastic rides, of witches perched on the branches of dead trees? Is not the monster whispering its secrets into the ears of the Monk related to the gnome who fascinated Bosch's Saint Anthony? But they are different for Goya, and their prestige, which overshadows all his later work, derives from another power. For Bosch or Brueghel, these forms are generated by the world itself;

  through the fissures of a strange poetry, they rise from stones and plants, they well out of an animal howl; the whole complicity of nature is not too much for their dance. Goya's forms are born out of nothing: they have no back­ground, in the double sense that they are silhouetted against only the most monotonous darkness, and that nothing can assign them their origin, their limit, and their nature. The Disparates are without landscape, without walls, without setting—and this is still a further difference from the Caprichos; there is not a star in the night sky of the great human bats we see in the Way of Flying. The branch on which these witches jabber—out of what tree does it grow? Does it fly? Toward what sabbath, and what clearing? Nothing in all this deals with a world, neither this one nor any other. It is indeed a question of that Sleep of Reason which Goya, in 1797, had already made the first image of the "universal idiom"; it is a question of a night which is doubtless that of classical unreason, that triple night into which Orestes sank. But in that night, man communicates with what is deepest in himself, and with what is most solitary. The desert of Bosch's Saint Anthony was infinitely populous; and even if it was a product of her imagination, the landscape that Dulle Griet moved through was marked by a whole human language. Goya's Monk,

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  with that hot beast against his back, its paws on his shoul­ders and its mouth panting at his ear, remains alone: no secret is revealed. All that is present is the most internal, and at the same time the most savagely free, of forces: the power which hacks apart the bodies in the Gran Disparate, which breaks free and assaults our eyes in the Raging Mad­ness. Beyond that point, the faces themselves decompose; this is no longer the madness of the Caprichos, which tied on masks truer than the truth of faces; this is a madness beneath the mask, a madness that eats away faces, corrodes features; there are no longer eyes or mouths, but glances shot from nowhere and staring at nothing (as in the Witches' Sabbath); or screams from black holes (as in the Pilgrimage of Saint Isidore). Madness has become man's possibility of abolishing both man and the world—and even those images that challenge the world and deform man. It is, far beyond dreams, beyond the nightmare of bestiality, the last recourse: the end and the beginning of everything. Not because it is a promise, as in German lyricism, but because it is the ambiguity of chaos and apocalypse: Goya's Idiot who shrieks and twists his shoulder to escape from the nothingness that imprisons him—is this the birth of the first man and his first movement toward liberty, or the last con­vulsion of the last dying man?

  And this madness that links and divides time, that twists the world into the ring of a single night, this madness so foreign to the experience of its contemporaries, does it not transmit—to those able to receive it, to Nietzsche and to Artaud—those barely audible voices of classical unreason, in which it was always a question of nothingness and night, but amplifying them now to shrieks and frenzy? But giving them for the first time an expression, a droit de cite, and a hold on Western culture which makes possible all contesta­tions, as well as total contestation? But restoring their prim­itive savagery?

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  Sade's calm, patient language also gathers up the final words of unreason and also gives them, for the future, a remoter meaning. Between Goya's broken drawings and that uninterrupted stream of words continuing from the first volume of Justine to the tenth of Juliette, there is doubtless nothing in common except a certain movement that retraces the course of contemporary lyricism, drying up its sources, rediscovering the secret of unreason's noth­ingness.

  Within the chateau where Sade's hero confines himself, within the convents, the forests, the dungeons where he endlessly pursues the agony of his victims, it seems at first glance that nature can act with utter freedom. There man rediscovers a truth he had forgotten, though it was mani­fest: what desire can be contrary to nature, since it was given to man by nature itself? And since it was taught by nature in the great lesson of life and death which never stops repeating itself in the world? The madness of desire, insane murders, the most unreasonable passions—all are wisdom and reason, since they are a part of the order of nature. Everything that morality and religion, everything that a clumsy society has stifled in man, revives in the castle of murders. There man is finally attuned to his own nature; or rather, by an ethic peculiar to this strange confinement, man must scrupulously maintain, without deviation, his fidelity to nature: a strict task, a total enterprise: "You will know nothing unless you have known everything; if you are timid enough to stop with Nature, she will escape you forever."1 Conversely, if man has wounded or changed na­ture, it is man's task to repair the damage through the mathematics of a sovereign vengeance: "Nature caused us all to be born equal; if fate is pleased to disturb this plan of the general law, it is our responsibility to correct its ca­price, and to repair by our attention the usurpations of the stronger."2 The slowness of revenge, like the insolence of

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  desire, belongs to nature. There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored.

  But this is only the first phase of Sade's thought: the ironic justification, both rational and lyrical, the gigantic pastiche, of Rousseau. Beyond this demonstration-by-ab­surdity of the inanity of contemporary philosophy, beyond all its verbiage about man and nature, the real decisions are still to be made: decisions that are also breaks, in which the links between man and his natural being disappear.3 The famous Society of the Friends of Crime, the project of a Swedish Constitution, once we remove their stinging refer­ences to the Social Contract and to the proposed constitu­tions for Poland or Corsica, establish nothing but the sov­ereign rigor of subjectivity in the rejection of all natural liberty and all natural equality: uncontrolled disposal of one member by the other, the unconditional exercise of violence, the limitless application of the right of death—this entire society, whose only link is the very rejection of a link, appears to be a dismissal of nature—the only cohesion asked of individuals is intended to protect, not a natural existence, but the free exercise of sovereignty over and against nature.4 The relation established by Rousseau is precisely reversed; sovereignty no longer transposes the natural existence; the latter is only an object for the sover­eign, which permits him to measure his total liberty. Fol­lowed to its logical conclusion, desire leads only in appear­ance to the rediscovery of nature. Actually, for Sade there is no return to the natal terrain, no hope that the first re­jection of social order may surreptitiously become the re­established order of happiness, through a dialectic of nature renouncing and thus confirming itself. The solitary mad­ness of desire that still for Hegel, as for the eighteenth-century philosophers, plunges man into a natural world that is immediately resumed in a social world, for Sade merely

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  casts man into a void that dominates nature in a total ab­sence of proportion and community, into the endlessly re­peated nonexistence of gratification. The night of madness is thus limitless; what might have been supposed to be man's violent nature was only the infinity of non-nature.

  Here is the source of Sade's great monotony: as he ad­vances, the settings dissolve; the surprises, the incidents, the pathetic or dramatic links of the scenes vanish. What was still vicissitude in Justine — an event experienced, hence new—becomes in Juliette a sovereign game, always trium­phant, without negativity, and whose perfection is such that its novelty can on
ly be its similarity to itself. As with Goya, there are no longer any backgrounds for these metic­ulous Disparates. And yet in this absence of decor, which can as easily be total night as absolute day (there are no shadows in Sade), we advance slowly toward a goal: the death of Justine. Her innocence had exhausted even the desire to torment it. We cannot say that crime had not overcome her virtue; we must say inversely that her natural virtue had brought her to the point of having exhausted all the possible means of being an object for crime. And at this point, when crime can do nothing more than drive her from the domain of its sovereignty (Juliette expels her from the Chateau de Noirceuil), Nature in her turn, so long dominated, scorned, profaned,5 submits entirely to that which contradicted her: Nature in turn enters madness, and there, in an instant, but for an instant only, restores her omnipotence. The storm that is unleashed, the lightning that strikes and consumes Justine, is Nature become crim­inal subjectivity. This death that seems to escape from the insane domain of Juliette belongs to Nature more pro­foundly than any other; the night of storm, of thunder and lightning, is a sufficient sign that Nature is lacerating herself, that she has reached the extreme point of her dissension, and that she is revealing in this golden flash a sovereignty

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  which is both herself and something quite outside herself: the sovereignty of a mad heart that has attained, in its soli­tude, the limits of the world that wounds it, that turns it against itself and abolishes it at the moment when to have mastered it so well gives it the right to identify itself with that world. That lightning-flash which Nature drew from herself in order to strike Justine was identical with the long existence of Juliette, who would also disappear in solitude, leaving no trace or corpse or anything upon which Nature could claim her due. The nothingness of unreason, in which the language of Nature had died forever, has be­come a violence of Nature and against Nature, to the point of the savage abolition of itself.6

  For Sade as for Goya, unreason continues to watch by night; but in this vigil it joins with fresh powers. The non-being it once was now becomes the power to annihilate. Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence, and of recovering tragic experience beyond the promises of dialec­tic.

  After Sade and Goya, and since them, unreason has be­longed to whatever is decisive, for the modern world, in any work of art: that is, whatever any work of art contains that is both murderous and constraining.

  The madness of Tasso, the melancholia of Swift, the de­lirium of Rousseau belong to their works, just as these works belong to their authors. Here in the texts, there in the lives of the men, the same violence spoke, or the same bitterness; visions certainly were exchanged; language and delirium interlaced. But further, the work of art and mad­ness, in classical experience, were more profoundly united at another level: paradoxically, at the point where they lim­ited one another. For there existed a region where madness challenged the work of art, reduced it ironically, made of

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  its iconographic landscape a pathological world of hallu­cinations; that language which was delirium was not a work of art. And conversely, delirium was robbed of its meager truth as madness if it was called a work of art. But by admitting this very fact, there was no reduction of one by the other, but rather (remembering Montaigne) a dis­covery of the central incertitude where the work of art is born, at the moment when it stops being born and is truly a work of art. In this opposition, to which Tasso and Swift bore witness after Lucretius—and which it was vain to at­tempt to separate into lucid intervals and crises—was dis­closed a distance where the very truth of a work of art raised a problem: was it madness, or a work of art? Inspira­tion, or hallucination? A spontaneous babble of words, or the pure origins of language? Must its truth, even before its birth, be taken from the wretched truth of men, or discov­ered far beyond its origin, in the being that it presumes? The madness of the writer was, for other men, the chance to see being born, over and over again, in the discourage­ment of repetition and disease, the truth of the work of art.

  The madness of Nietzsche, the madness of Van Gogh or of Artaud, belongs to their work perhaps neither more nor less profoundly, but in quite another way. The frequency in the modem world of works of art that explode out of madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of that world, about the meaning of such works, or even about the relations formed and broken between the real world and the artists who produced such works. And yet this fre­quency must be taken seriously, as if it were the insistence of a question: from the time of Holderlin and Nerval, the number of writers, painters, and musicians who have "suc­cumbed" to madness has increased; but let us make no mis­take here; between madness and the work of art, there has been no accommodation, no more constant exchange, no

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  communication of languages; their opposition is much more dangerous than formerly; and their competition now allows no quarter; theirs is a game of life and death. Artaud's madness does not slip through the fissures of the work of art; his madness is precisely the absence of the work of art, the reiterated presence of that absence, its central void experienced and measured in all its endless di­mensions. Nietzsche's last cry, proclaiming himself both Christ and Dionysos, is not on the border of reason and unreason, in the perspective of the work of art, their com­mon dream, finally realized and immediately vanishing, of a reconciliation of the "shepherds of Arcady and the fisher­men of Tiberias"; it is the very annihilation of the work of art, the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent; the hammer has just fallen from the phi­losopher's hands. And Van Gogh, who did not want to ask "permission from doctors to paint pictures," knew quite well that his work and his madness were incompatible.

  Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. Artaud's oeuvre experiences its own absence in madness, but that experience, the fresh courage of that ordeal, all those words hurled against a fundamental absence of language, all that space/of physical suffering and terror which sur­rounds or rather coincides with the void—that is the work of art itself: the sheer cliff over the abyss of the work's absence. Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably, and hangs forever over history. It is of little importance on exactly which day in the autumn of 1888 Nietzsche went mad for good, and after which his texts no longer afford philosophy but psychiatry: all of

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  them, including the postcard to Strindberg, belong to Nietzsche, and all are related to The Birth of Tragedy. But we must not think of this continuity in terms of a system, of a thematics, or even of an existence: Nietzsche's mad­ness—that is, the dissolution of his thought—is that by which his thought opens out onto the modem world. What made it impossible makes it immediate for us; what took it from Nietzsche offers it to us. This does not mean that madness is the only language common to the work of art and the modern world (dangers of the pathos of maledic­tion, inverse and symmetrical danger of psychoanalyses);

  but it means that, through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actu­ally engages within itself the world's time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an­swer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. What is necessarily a profanation in the work of art returns to that point, and, in the time of that work swamped in madness, the world is made aware of its guilt. Henceforth, and through the me­diation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable (for the first time in the Western world) in relation to the work of art; it is now arraigned by the work of art
, obliged to order itself by its language, compelled by it to a task of recognition, of reparation, to the task of restoring reason from that unreason and to that unreason. The madness in which the work of art is engulfed is the space of our enter­prise, it is the endless path to fulfillment, it is our mixed vo­cation of apostle and exegete. This is why it makes little difference when the first voice of madness insinuated itself into Nietzsche's pride, into Van Gogh's humility. There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art— the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; inhere there

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  is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth. The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning of the time when the world finds itself arraigned by that work of art and responsible before it for what it is.