Session 2: ‘Madness’ After Nietzsche and Foucault

Session 2: ‘Madness’ After Nietzsche and Foucault
Chair: Rob Fisher
Imagine Madness: Madness, Revolution and Ressentiment
Emma Bell
University of East Anglia, United Kingdom

This paper focuses on a short passage by Nietzsche on the reciprocity between revolution and madness: ‘those men irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had, if they were not actually mad, no alternative but to make themselves or pretend to be mad’ (Daybreak, §I:14) From romanticism, through avant-gardism, to contemporary critical theory, some who sought to ‘make it new’ have willed madness as a means of liberation and revenge, sanctifying madness as a politically, aesthetically, and ontologically subversive way of being.
Nietzsche then asks: ‘do you understand why it had to be madness that did this?’, and ‘how can one make oneself mad when one is not mad?’ In response, the paper identifies the function that the words ‘madness’, ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘hysteria’ perform in the work of avant-gardists including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Andrè Breton, and the radical theorists they influenced including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Helene Cixous. These thinkers equivalently imagine madness as the condition of existential and ontological authenticity that therefore precedes socialisation. If the perceived loss of self in mental illness is the negation of subjection and alienation, it promises a more devastating loss of the self – individual, innate, unified. So madness is the psychic precondition of social revolution: psychopathology as a politics.
The paper concludes that this will to madness is a certain leftist political moral urge equivalent to what Nietzsche called the angry melancholia of ressentiment – the moralistic attachment to suffering that spends its will to protest in self-alienation and synthetic ‘ecstasies of delirium and mental suffering’. Ultimately, radically imagined madness is a captivatingly narcissistic image of subversion and radical difference that is made to reflect the revolutionary’s own ideals of existential authenticity, ingenuous creativity, and social revolution.
This paper may compliment sessions on the passion of madness (anger, resentment, revenge), resisting normality, the value of madness, or the liberating promise of madness.

With the publication in 2006 of ‘History of Madness’, Foucault’s celebrated magnum opus historicizing the concepts ‘reason’ and ‘unreason’ finally became available in an unabridged English translation. Its impact, however, had been felt much earlier. Already in the 1970’s, partly in response to the criticisms of the sixties’ anti-psychiatry movement (themselves to a large extent fuelled by this work), Western governments embarked on a policy of deinstitutionalization that led to the numbers of psychiatric inpatients falling by three-quarters. After some 300 years, what Foucault had termed the ‘great confinement’ was over.
How, then, might his views be applied to the understanding of mental illness in an era of community care and evidence-based medicine? I shall argue that it is his concept of ‘biopower’, understood as a source of subjectivity rather than domination, that holds most potential for illuminating the ways in which madness is perceived today.
For one thing, thanks to the proliferation of diagnostic categories and lowering in the stigma associated with most of these, we are all free – if not actively encouraged – to find the disorder that suits us. In the jargon of the contemporary mental health sector, we are all ‘service-users’ now. Second, in an age characterized not so much by conformity as restless relativism, the numerous forms of ‘talking therapy’ offered to the mentally ill (and pursued by the worried well) have become an essential medium for framing what Foucault  referred to as the ‘relationship between man and his own truth’. A third instance of biopower is the demand increasingly pressed by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to be seen as ‘scientist-practitioners’: the prestige of biomedicine may seem to legitimize this claim, but the supposedly non-evaluative statistical norms that are their stock-in-trade are internalized by patients and so become normalizing after all.

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In his archaeologies, Foucault identifies a discontinuous history of ruptures.  By analyzing unique periods in history to find continuity within a discourse and difference between discourses, Foucault uncovers discursively constituted epistemes and the breaking points that separate them. Via the radical shift from archaeological to genealogical analysis, Foucault recoups his project from the limitations of discursivity and anonymity with a notion of event-centered history and heterogeneous subjects.  In his later genealogy, Foucault moves away from emphasizing the discourse of epistemes, to historically situated notions of subjectivity, specifically within marginalized groups. But Foucault curiously neglects to analyze the possible connections between his earlier linguistic studies and the subjects of genealogy. Additionally, this genealogy succumbs to scrutiny by other theorists; faulting Foucault for the inflexibility of power structures, critics wonder how a historically constituted subject can also be a self-creative subject. Beginning with an exegesis of Foucault’s work on rupture and subjectivity, positioning this work within Butler and Han’s critical framework, and finally analyzing the possibilities of a genealogy of Catherine Clément’s hysteric’s discourse, I suggest that the hysteric’s discourse can provide a synthesis of the genealogical and archaeological—allowing for a self-creative subjectivity within the ruptures of discursive formations.  Although the hysteric has been historically considered as simply the paradigm for a madwoman, I follow Clément’s sophisticated analysis of the productive potentials of hysteric discourse in a post-Lacanian sense.  Perhaps by recognizing the potential for the hysterical discourse to combine the archaeological with the genealogical, the discursive with the subjective, the rupture with creation, Foucault’s project can be synthesized and reinvigorated. Whereas Butler views Foucault’s understanding of the subject in his genealogical work to be problematic and incomplete, a reinvigorated genealogy of the hysteric subject could fill-in important gaps—or ruptures.

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