Critical Inquiry
Winter 1995
Volume 21, Number 2
Excerpt from "Madness, the Absence of Work" by Michel Foucault,
translated by Peter Stastny and Denis Sengel:
"Perhaps some day we will no longer really know what madness was. Its face
will have closed upon itself, no longer allowing us to decipher the traces it
may have left behind. Will these traces themselves have become anything to the
unknowing gaze but simple black marks? Or will that the most have become part
of the configurations that we others now cannot sketch but that in the future
would constitute the indispensable grids through which we and our culture
become legible? Artaud will belong to the foundation of our language, not to
its rupture: the neuroses will belong among the constitutive forms (and not
the deviations) of our society. Everything we experience today in the mode of
a limit, or as foreign, or as intolerable will have returned to the serenity
of the positive.
Only the enigma of this exteriority will remain. What was, then, this strange
demarcation, one will ask, that was at work from the heart of the Middle Ages
until the twentieth century and possibly beyond? Why did Western culture cast
from its field that in which it might just as well have recognized itself,
where in fact it had recognized itself obliquely? Why has it formulated so
clearly since the nineteenth century, but in a way already since the classical
age, that madness was the truth of the human laid bare while nevertheless
placing it in a space, neutralized and pale, where it was as it were canceled?
What was the point of collecting the texts of Nerval or Artaud? Why discover
oneself in their utterances and not in themselves?
So the sharp image of reason will wither in flames..."
Return to Table of Contents