Pli Volume 13

Contents Foucault: Madness/Sexuality/Biopolitics First Preface to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961) MICHEL FOUCAULT 1 Preface to the Italian edition of La volonté de savoir MICHEL FOUCAULT 11 Astride a Low Wall: Notes on Philosophy and Madness PIER ALDO ROVATTI 13 Lucid Unreason: Artaud and Foucault LORENZO CHIESA 26 Logics of Delirium REMO BODEI 66 Words, Desires and Ideas: Freud, Foucault and the Hermaphroditic Roots of Bisexuality SHARON COWAN & STUART ELDEN 79 From Biopower to Biopolitics MAURIZIO LAZZARATO 100 Toward a Conception of Racism without Race: Foucault and Contemporary Biopolitics WARREN MONTAG 113 A Fugitive Thread: The Production of Subjectivity in Marx JASON READ 126 Varia Teleosemantics and the Genesis of Norms: Co-opting Brandom TIM SCHROEDER 145 When Latour meets Nietzsche Around the Concept of Individuation JONATHAN PHILIPPE 162 Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: The Re-Commencement of Dialectical Materialism (Part II) BRUNO BOSTEELS 173 Towards a Material Imaginary: Bataille, Nonlogical Difference, and the Language of Base Materialism F. SCOTT SCRIBNER 209 Reviews Peter Abelard’s Stoic Ethics JOHN SELLARS 222 What’s a Brain Supposed to Do? MICHAEL FERRER 229 Pli 13 (2002), 1-10. First Preface to Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961)1 MICHEL FOUCAULT Pascal: “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” And this other text, by Dostoyevsky, from his Diary of a Writer: “It is not by confining one’s neighbour that one is convinced of one’s good sense.” We have yet to write the history of that other turn of madness, whereby men, in the gesture of sovereign reason that confines their neighbour, communicate and recognise each other through the merciless language of non-madness; to recover the moment of this conjuration, before madness was definitively established in the realm of truth, before it was revived by the lyricism of protest. We must try to return, within history, to that zero degree of the history of madness, in which it is undifferentiated experience, a yet to be shared and divided experience of division itself. To describe, from the origin of its parabola, this “other turn” which lets Reason and Madness fall on either side of its gesture, as things henceforth external, deaf to all exchange, and as though dead to one another. This is doubtless an uncomfortable region. To explore it we must renounce the comfort of terminal truths, and never allow ourselves to be guided by what we may know of madness. None of the concepts of psychopathology, even and especially in the implicit play of retrospections, must be allowed to exert an organising role. What is 1 This preface was published in its entirety only in the first French edition of what has come to be known in English as Madness and Civilization [M. Foucault, Folie et Déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), p. i-xi]. From 1972 on it disappeared from further editions. Though portions of it are contained in the English translation, they have been modified here for the sake of consistency. – Trans. 2 Pli 13 (2002) constitutive is the gesture that divides madness, and not the science that establishes itself once this division is made and calm restored. What is originary is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; as for the hold exerted by reason upon non-reason in order to wrest from it its truth as madness, crime, or disease, it derives by far from this caesura. We must therefore speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or a right to victory; we must speak of those gestures as they are repeated in history, leaving in abeyance everything that could figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth; we must speak of this cutting gesture, of this distance set, of this void instituted between reason and what is not reason, without ever relying on the plenitude of what it claims to be. Then, and then only, will the realm appear in which the man of madness and the man of reason, in the movement of their separation, are not yet separate; and in which, in a very originary and very crude language, antedating by far that of science, they begin the dialogue of their rupture, testifying in a fugitive way that they still speak to one another. Here madness and non-madness, reason and non-reason are inextricably involved: inseparable since they do not yet exist, and nevertheless existing for each other, the one in relation to the other, in the exchange that separates them. In the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand, there is the man of reason who delegates the physician in the direction of madness, thereby only authorising a relationship through the abstract universality of illness; on the other, the man of madness who communicates with the other only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason embodied in order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, and the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is none; or rather, there is no 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 acquired, and thrusts into oblivion all those imperfect words, without a fixed syntax, and a little stammered, through which the exchange of madness and reason took place. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason on madness, was able to establish itself 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. Michel Foucault 3 * The Greeks had a relation to something that they called ubris. This relation was not merely one of condemnation; the existence of Thrasymachus or of Callicles suffices to prove it, even if their discourse was transmitted to us already enveloped in the reassuring dialectic of Socrates. But the Greek Logos had no contrary. European man, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, has had a relation to something he refers to confusedly as: Madness, Dementia, Unreason. Perhaps it is to this obscure presence that Western reason owes something of its depth, as the swjrosunh of the Socratic chatterboxes owes something to the threat of urbis. In any case, the Reason-Unreason nexus constitutes one of the dimensions of the originality of Western culture; it already accompanied it long before Hieronymus Bosch, and will follow it long after Nietzsche and Artaud. What, then, is this confrontation beneath the language of reason? Towards what could we be led by an interrogation that would not follow reason in its horizontal becoming, but would instead seek to retrace within time this constant verticality which, all throughout European culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it up to its own dismeasure? Towards what realm would we be directed, which is neither the history of knowledge nor history as such; which is commanded neither by the teleology of truth nor by the rational concatenation of causes, causes whose only value and sense lie beyond division? A realm, no doubt, were it would be a question of the limits rather than of the identity of a culture. One could produce a history of limits – of these obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are made, whereby a culture rejects something that it will then consider as its Exterior; and all throughout its history, this hollowed-out void, this white space with which it isolates itself will designate it just as much as its values. For it receives these values, and maintains them in the continuity of history; but in this region of which we wish to speak, it exercises its essential choices, it effects the division that provides it with the face of its positivity; here is to be found the originary density wherein it is formed. To interrogate a culture with regard to its limit-experiences is to question it, at the borders of history, about a rending that constitutes something like the very birth of its history. Thus, there arises the confrontation, in a tension always about to be undone, between the temporal continuity of a dialectical analysis and the updating, at the doors of time, of a tragic structure. 4 Pli 13 (2002) At the centre of the limit-experiences of the West is – of course – the explosive presence of the tragic itself. Nietzsche showed that the tragic structure on the basis of which the history of the Western world came to be constituted was nothing other than the refusal, the forgetting, and the silent collapse of tragedy. Around this collapse, which is central because it links the tragic to the dialectic of history in the very refusal of tragedy by history, many others gravitate. Each one of them, at the borders of our culture, traces a limit that designates, at the same time, an originary division. In the universality of Western ratio, there is this division called the Orient: the Orient, thought as origin, dreamed of as the vertiginous point whence are born the nostalgias and promises of return, the Orient offered up to the colonising reason of the West but nevertheless indefinitely inaccessible, since it forever remains as the limit: night of the beginning, in which the West was formed, but in which it traced a dividing line, for the West the Orient is everything that it itself is not, whilst it is nonetheless bound to look within it for its own primitive truth.

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