Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth

Alan Sheridan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415051170
• eBook ISBN: 9781134942022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth is the first full-length study of Foucault in any language. It covers the whole of his work to date, including material unavailable in English, and provides invaluable information on recent French intellectual history. Foucault emerges as an essential thinker for our time: his 'political anatomy' implies a radical critique not only of established intellectual positions, and social institutions, but also most of the alternatives offered by the opposition.

Part 1

The Archaeology of Knowledge

1

Madness, Death, and the Birth of Reason

Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique—to give the book its full, original title—was first published by Plon in 1961. Two years later, a considerably shorter version appeared in a cheap, pocket-book edition in the 10/18 series. The English edition, Madness and Civilization, first published in the United States in 1965 and two years later in Britain, was a translation of the shortened version, with the addition of one chapter and of other material from the original edition. (Nevertheless, the English version still represents only two-fifths of the French original.) In 1972, the first edition having long been out of print, Gallimard published a second unabridged version, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. When asked to provide a new preface for this ‘already old book’, Foucault refused to act as judge of his own work, to justify or to condemn positions adopted eleven years earlier. Instead, he turned out a brilliant little essay on the genre ‘author’s preface’ in which no mention is made of the book it prefaces. What is more, he insisted that the original preface—a beautiful, illuminating piece—be suppressed. My own references will be to the second French edition and, where possible, to the English translation (HF and MC respectively). My quotations from the first preface will be indicated by the letters FD (Folie et déraison).

In an interview published in 1977, Foucault links the writing of Histoire de la folie to the political situation of the 1950s. In the wake of the Lysenko affair and the discrediting of so-called ‘socialist science’, left-wing intellectuals had become acutely aware of the problem of the relations between science and politics. Perhaps, thought the young Foucault, the problems posed by the relations between, say, theoretical physics or organic chemistry and the political and economic structures of society are too complicated, their threshold of possible explanation beyond our reach. If, however, one took a less pure, more ‘dubious’ science such as psychiatry, the relations between knowledge and power might emerge more clearly. Such an explanation of the genesis of Histoire de la folie could have occurred to no one but Foucault himself. It is unlikely that psychiatry presented itself to Foucault as just one, among other, ‘dubious’ sciences. On the contrary, his attention was carried unerringly from philosophy to psychiatry, from the core of Reason to the frontiers of Reason, and beyond. Beyond because Foucault’s interest in psychiatry was shortlived: it had led him towards what he chose, in all simplicity, to call ‘madness’. But he soon came to see that psychiatry represented the tyranny of ‘reason’ over ‘madness’. As he went beyond the frontiers of reason, he found himself in a sort of no-man’s land. How could one speak of madness in the language of reason? There was no formal discourse, no recognized discipline within which one could speak of it. In this twilight world, beyond the light of reason, yet this side of total darkness, a few signposts loomed up: Hölderlin, Nerval, Van Gogh, Raymond Roussel, Artaud and, above all, the key, enigmatic figure of Nietzsche, the ‘mad philosopher’. The names recur constantly, in different orders, sometimes with one or other of the names absent, like so many signs, touchstones, a litany. They are the great mediators between the separated worlds of ‘reason’ and ‘madness’. They represent a phenomenon which, thanks to the tyranny exercised by the one over the other, thanks to science in general and psychiatry in particular, no longer enjoys the currency it once did. Foucault knew that he was not of their number, that his own position lay short of theirs. But he, too, could be a mediator, situated more easily in the academy than in the asylum, but one who could never sit comfortably in a professorial chair, who would never forget the straightjacket that was its silenced counterpart. In that first Preface of 1961, Foucault shows that he was amply aware of his mission. This was to be the first stage in a ‘long inquiry’, carried out ‘under the sun of Nietzsche’s great search’. Foucault mentions other areas of possible research, that, for example, of the sexual prohibitions of our own culture and the whole question of ‘repression’ and ‘tolerance’. This is of course the subject of the six-volume ‘History of Sexuality’ begun some fifteen years later. But before embarking on his genealogy of Western thought he had first to examine the act of exclusion that made the triumphs of reason possible.

The title ‘History of Madness’ is deceptively banal—one critic complained that it did little justice to what was, after all, a brilliantly original, even iconoclastic work. But neither of its terms is used without irony. ‘History’ suggests a certain assurance, sanctioned by an institution, a discipline and, ultimately, reason itself. Yet Foucault’s enterprise undermines institution, discipline, and the rule of reason. Likewise, when Foucault speaks of ‘madness’ he does so not from the standpoint of reason. He offers no definition of the term. He refuses to see it as a constant, unchanging reality, man’s growing understanding of which is reflected in an ever more refined vocabulary. The word is useful to Foucault precisely because it is non-medical, because it is used by everyone and spans the entire period with which he is concerned. Madness is not initially a fact, but a judgement—even if that judgement becomes itself a fact. It is a judgement passed by one part of the human mind on another. One person on another. The Preface to the first edition opens with two quotations, one from Pascal (‘Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness’) and one from Dostoievsky (‘It is not by confining one’s neighbours that one is convinced of one’s own sanity’). What we have, then, is not so much a ‘history of madness’ as a ‘history’ of ‘madness’, a counter-history of that ‘other form of madness’, that ‘autre tour’, that further turn or twist— Pascal’s image is that of the turn of a key, or screw. Under cover of his title, the student of philosophy and psychiatry has gone over to the other side:

We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness (FD, i; MC, xi).

That particular ‘madness’ is as old, as recent, as modern science. It is as if Newtonian physics and Cartesian rationalism required that ‘madness’, that establishment of the sole sovereignty of reason, and the consequent expulsion of anything that constituted a threat to its rule, as a necessary condition of their birth. What is significant in the treatment accorded the ‘insane’ over the last three hundred years is not an increase in scientificity, nor the spread of more ‘humane’ attitudes and methods, but the continuing allegiance paid to ‘reason’ and the complete failure to listen either to one’s own ‘necessary’ madness or to those labelled ‘mad’.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, could be established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence (FD, ii; MC, xii–xiii).

This is the first appearance of the term ‘archaeology’ in Foucault’s oeuvre. Here it is thrown off almost in passing, as if Foucault is looking around for a word to distinguish what he is doing from ‘history’. The concept that is to play such a central role in his thinking, from this work through Naissance de la clinique (subtitled ‘une archéologie du regard medical’) and Les mots et les choses (subtitled ‘une archéologie des sciences humaines’) to L’archéologie du savoir, is clearly enough adumbrated here. For Foucault, history—and the ‘history of ideas’ in particular—is too deeply imbued with notions of continuity, causality and teleology, which stem from modern rationalism and ultimately from the Cartesian notion of the constitutive subject. Against the triumphant, onward, horizontal march of history, Foucault sets the ‘constant vertically’ of the tragic, of the limits set by madness and death.

Foucault’s enterprise, then, is to go back, beyond modern rationalism and science, to a time when madness was still an ‘undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself, before Reason and Madness were relegated to separate, noncommunicating cells. In exploring that ‘uncomfortable region’ we must, of course, renounce as far as possible the attitudes, techniques, vocabulary inherited from that division. We must abandon any notion that we now possess the truth about madness. Indeed, we must set aside anything we think we know about it, any temptation to analyse, order, classify madness from some retrospective standpoint. Not to do so would be to speak the language of exclusion, a language that Foucault himself had learnt, and rejected.

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made…

What, then, is this confrontation beneath the language of reason? Where can an interrogation lead us that does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant verticality which confronts European culture with what it is not, establishes its range by its own derangement? What realm do we enter which is neither the history of knowledge, nor history itself; which is controlled neither by the teleology of truth nor the rational sequence of causes, since causes have value and meaning only beyond the division? A realm, no doubt, where what is in question is the limits rather than the identity of a culture (FD, ii–iii; MC, xii–xiii).

In a phrase, striking by turns for its apparent inappropriateness, inadequacy, and excess, Foucault defines the basic condition of madness, stripped of all the interpretations offered by science. It is characterized, he says, by ‘une absence d’oeuvre’, an unproductive idleness, outside human achievement, outside ‘the great work of history’. It is the void on which the plenitude of history is built, a constant, unchanging ‘experience’ that stands perpendicular to the horizontal of history. The ‘possibility of history’ is linked to the ‘necessity of madness’. To attempt a ‘history of madness’ is, therefore, a contradiction in terms. The ‘experience of madness’, in the raw, prior to its capture by knowledge, is, in itself, inaccessible. To observe madness is to place oneself on the side of reason—one would be better employed observing reason. Look hard enough at reason, Foucault seems to be saying, and you will find madness. That, in a sense, is the course he adopts. Fighting his way back through the shifting mass of ‘notions, institutions, measures taken by judiciary and police, scientific concepts’, he locates the heart of his enterprise, ‘the decision that at once binds together and separates reason and madness’. His task is to uncover the ‘perpetual exchange, the obscure common root, the original confrontation that gives sense to both the unity and the opposition of sense and senselessness’ (FD, vii).

Once one goes back beyond the mid-seventeenth century, beyond the division between reason and madness, people no longer seem to be talking of quite the same thing when they use the word ‘madness’. English speakers have an additional problem. Not only does Renaissance ‘madness’ seem to have a quite distinct dimension from that of madness after the rise of rationalism, but it is coupled with another word, ‘folly’. Foucault’s folie, of course, covers both senses. This problem is particularly acute for the translator—a problem that is not entirely solved in Madness and Civilization. For the translator, the difficulty is not that the French covers two quite different notions and that he has merely to decide which is intended. ‘Folly’ and ‘madness’ do not represent two different concepts, nor even a spectrum ranging from pure madness at one end to pure folly at the other, but a shifting confused relation in which no one seems quite certain when or why one should be more appropriate than the other. We speak of the Ship of Fools and the Feast of Fools, Erasmus praises folly, but King Lear goes mad. The last case is not as simple as it looks. Lear is not just a foolish man who goes mad (accompanied by his fool and a man feigning madness). For Kent, Lear is ‘mad’ at the outset: ‘be Kent unmannerly, When Lear is mad’. A few lines later, Kent repeats exactly the same sentiment, using ‘folly’: ‘To plainness honour’s bound When majesty falls to folly’. Clearly, the two words are often interchangeable: not only can ‘folly’ stand for what we mean by ‘madness’, but ‘mad’ can stand for what we mean by ‘foolish’. King Lear is no doubt the richest source for our understanding of that twilight world between distinction and synonym in which the Renaissance experienced folly and madness. Reversing the point I am making, it is salutory to realize that no distinction exists in Le Roi Lear. How, one wonders, do Shakespeare’s translators render: ‘Oh, Fool, I shall go mad!’ Obviously, in the only way possible, by replacing a subtle, gentle distinction by a sublime pun: ‘Ah, Fou, je deviendrai fou’. In this instance, at least, the translation would have its own effectiveness. After all, one clear implication of the English and one that the Fool never ceases to harp on, is that Lear has exchanged his crown for a cap and bells. Majesty does fall to folly and, in folly, in madness, Lear finds the wisdom he never knew as king and which, in his own burlesque way, the Fool has possessed all along. What, then, is Foucault’s translator to do with folie and fou? Clearly, ‘madness’, ‘mad’, ‘madman’ and ‘folly’, ‘foolish’, ‘fool’ must be used when they are felt to be most appropriate. But the English reader should make a mental note that whenever one set of terms is used the other is also present within it. After the mid-seventeenth century, of course, the problem does not arise. Folly/madness and its free communication with Reason disappears. In its place, there is a new Reason and a new Madness, new because one has come to dominate and exclude the other: in such a relationship neither can remain the same, even if the words do. In English, significantly, ‘folly’ disappears from the exalted language of philosophers and moralists altogether.

With the waning of the Middle Ages leprosy disappeared from the Western world. Its role as focus of exclusion in the European consciousness was, for a time, taken over by venereal disease. But the true heir of leprosy, says Foucault, was that ‘highly complex phenomenon’, madness. But it needed a period of latency, lasting almost two hundred years, before madness aroused similar reactions of isolation, exclusion and purification. Before madness was finally tamed, it had participated in ‘all the major experiences of the Renaissance’. One of the most potent symbols of this participation was the ‘stultifera navis’, or Ship of Fools, that ‘strange “drunken boat” that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flemish canals’ and which gave rise to a mass of literary and artistic works. At this time madmen were not generally interned. They were often expelled from the city itself, but allowed to wander freely over the countryside. To prevent their return, they were often entrusted to groups of merchants and pilgrims, who then deposited them at a safe distance from their place of origin. Certainly considerations of public order played their part, but there were other purposes at work in this movement of madmen from one place to another. The practices associated with their departure and embarkation suggest rituals of exclusion:

Certain madmen were publicly whipped, and in the course of a kind of game they were chased in a mock race and driven out of the city with quarterstaff blows… But water adds to this the dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fools’ boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the madman’s liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern… Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. Is it this ritual and these values which are at the origin of the long imaginary relationship that can be traced through the whole of Western culture? Or is it, conversely, this relationship that, from time immemorial, has called into being and established the rite of embarkation? One thing at least is certain: water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man (HF, 21–2; MC, 10–12).

The Ship of Fools emerged, out of all proportion to its actual presence in the life of the community, as the focus of a deep-seated unease that suddenly dawned on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages. Folly and the fool became a major preoccupation in literature and art from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. First, in a mass of comic tales and moral fables, ‘folly’ seems to usurp the democracy of the vices and establish its own singular rule as the root of all human failings. Then, in the satirical farces, the character of the ‘fool’ himself assumes more and more importance.

He is no longer a ridiculous and familiar silhouette in the wings:

he stands centre stage as the guardian of truth… In a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, he is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception… Folly also has its academic pastimes; it is the object of argument, it contends against itself; it is denounced, and defends itself by claiming that it is closer to happiness and truth than reason, that it is closer to reason than reason itself… Finally, at the centre of all these serious games, the great humanist texts: the Moria rediviva of Flayder and Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. And confronting all these discussions, with their tireless dialectic, confronting these discourses, constantly reworded and reworked, a long dynasty of images, from Hieronymus Bosch with The Cure of Folly and The Ship of Fools, down to Brueghel and his Dulle Griet; woodcuts and engravings transcribe what the theatre, what literature and art have already taken up: the intermingled themes of the Feast and of the Dance of Fools. Indeed, from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has haunted the imagination of Western Man…

Up to the second half of the fifteenth century, or even a little beyond, the theme of death reigns alone. The end of man, the end of time, bear the face of pestilence and war. What overhangs human existence is this conclusion and this order from which nothing escapes. The presence that threatens even within this world is a fleshless one. Then in the last years of the century this enormous uneasiness turns on itself; the mockery of folly replaces death and its solemnity. From the discovery of that necessity which inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself. Fear in the face of the absolute limit of death turns inwards in a continuous irony; man disarms it in advance, making it an object of derision by giving it an everyday, tamed form, by constantly renewing it in the spectacle of life, by scattering it throughout the vices, the difficulties and the absurdities of all men. Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty… When the fool laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the madman, anticipating the macabre has disarmed it. The cries of Dulle Griet tri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• PART I The Archaeology of Knowledge
• PART II The Genealogy of Power
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index