Monday, August 23, 2010

Fringe, Madness and Civilization

Today I went to see "Have a Nice Life," a play that was part of the NYC Fringe Festival currently going on, a festival that immodestly calls itself "NYC's best staycation." A play in the style of musical theater, "Have a Nice Life" featured a cast of characters in group therapy, their issues and their reactions to each other.


I was skeptical at first, not sure what I had gotten myself into, but as the characters and scenarios became gradually quirkier and more humorous, I found myself both amused and contemplative, marks of an enjoyable and worthwhile, if somewhat absurd, play.

Fittingly and coincidentally (or was it, entirely?), I found myself perusing old writing today, both my private reflections and academic papers. I leave you with this excerpt of a paper I wrote:

"The Complicity of Madness and Reason: An Analysis of Derrida and Foucault"

The critique given in Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Cogito and the History of Folly,” of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization offers a complex interpretation of language and philosophy in relation to madness and reason. Language, or logos, Derrida argues, is necessarily a construction of reason that is bounded by its objectivist cultural legacy and is therefore unable to grasp its precursor, counterpart, or excess: madness.

Madness and reason, yoked at origin by the moment of decision, have actually never severed their intimate relations and are not such opposing concepts as our culture maintains. Derrida himself acknowledges that Foucault, in his mad desire (so-called “mad” by Derrida himself) to archeologize silence/madness itself (35-36), has somehow succeeded in breaking the constraining reason that language is bounded by, through somehow approximating and detailing madness to make its history knowable. Derrida writes that Foucault creates a discourse of a “language without support” that receives no reliance upon absolute reason. (38) This ability to communicate outside of reason, to exist textually in this liminal state between reason and madness (which is itself silent) is based on the moment of decision, Derrida argues. It is this crucial moment of decision, a moment free from reason that is only subsequently rationalized, that points to the intimacy, and even inseparability, of madness and reason.

The decision, Derrida writes, “through a single act, links and separates reason and madness” (38). The common root of reason and madness is a fundamental binary that has simultaneously exiled madness from our culture yet maintained it as a necessary part of culture and history itself. History is, similarly to language, defined by its exclusion of madness, and actually made possible by madness (42). Madness, this indescribable, liberalized state free from the constraints of language and reason, is yet held in check by its opposition to such principles – reason and language – in a symmetry of economy. The permeation of madness, yet with equaled silence about it, begs the question to what degree this binary between madness and reason is itself a false construction.

Indeed, Derrida acknowledges as the essay develops that philosophy most resembles madness, as he writes: “And philosophy is perhaps the reassurance given against the anguish of being mad at the point of greatest proximity to madness” (59). This proximity of reason and madness causes a questioning of this supposed binary system entirely. If madness and reason stem from the same root, are both modes of human cognition, and reason and language are protectionist measures against this madness that yet succeeds to persevere in human culture, then at what point is the distinction false? Where does pure reason end and pure madness begin; and how does their proximity call for the invention of a new, multi-focal, non-binary mode of thinking? Derrida’s conclusion that the crises of reason are in complicity with the crises of madness points specifically to the interdependence and similarity in human culture of madness and reason, an interdependence that is becoming increasingly inescapable in contemporary culture.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization.New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

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