“It is understandable then that tragic heroes, unlike the baroque characters who had preceded them, could never be mad, and that inversely madness could never take on the tragic value we have known since Nietzsche and Artaud. In the classical epoch, tragic characters and the mad face each other without any possible dialogue or common language, for the one can only pronounce the decisive language of being, where the truth of light and the depths of night meet in a flash, and the other repeats endlessly an indifferent murmur where the empty chatter of the day is cancelled out by the deceptive lies of the shadows.”

— Michel Foucault

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

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Michel Foucault 128

French philosopher 1926–1984

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“The constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

“Never allow yourself to become comfortable for that is when fear is guiding your decisions. Confronting fear can be exciting and exhilarating. Let others believe your mad. Only you require truth.”

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“In the tragedies of the early seventeenth century, madness too provided the dénouement, but it did so in liberating the truth. It still opened onto language, to a renewed form of speech, that of explanation and of the real regained. The most it could ever be was the penultimate moment of tragedy. Not the closing moment, as in Andromaque, where no truth appears, other than, in Delirium, the truth of a passion that finds its fullest, most perfect expression in madness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

“We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”

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“Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.”

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“It would be almost unbelievable, if history did not record the tragic fact, that men have gone to war and cut each other's throats because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.”

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State v. Beal http://books.google.com/books?id=lEFOAQAAIAAJ&q=%22it+would+be+almost+unbelievable+if+history+did+not+record+the+tragic+fact+that+men+have+gone+to+war+and+cut+each+other's+throats+because+they+could+not+agree+as+to+what+was+to+become+of+them+after+their+throats+were+cut%22&pg=PA302#v=onepage, 199 N.C. 278 (1930).

“Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it's the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

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