ISBN 10: 0–203–64260–0 (eBook)
Routledge, 2006. Edited by Jean Khalfa
Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
“The caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason is the origin; the grip in which reason holds non-reason to extract its truth as madness, fault or sickness derives from that, and much further off.” p. XXVIII
Preface to the 1961 edition.
#Abandonment is his (a leper’s) salvation, and exclusion offers an unusual form of communion.” p.6. –They were to live away from everyone, to observe life and worship but to never partake; yet, they were not separssred from the grad e of God like the leper who died on a rich man`s doorstep and was taken to heaven.
“Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a
distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion
would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar
fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played
by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the ‘alienated’, and
the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion
is the matter of this study. The forms this exclusion took would continue,
in a radically different culture and with a new meaning, but remaining
essentially the major form of a rigorous division, at the same time social
exclusion and spiritual reintegration.” p.6
Venerial disease took over leprosy:
” despite their longstanding right to stay in these segregated areas, there were too few of them to make their voices heard, and the venereal, more or less everywhere, had soon taken their place” p.7
“Locked in the ship from which he could not escape, the madman was handed over to the thousand armed river, to the sea where all paths cross, and the great uncertainty that surrounds all things. A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, on the most open road of all, chained solidly to the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own.” p. 11
“the link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man.” p. 11
“a long series of ‘follies’ which as in the past stigmatised vices or faults but blamed them not on pride, a lack of charity or the neglect of Christian virtues but on a great unreason which could be blamed on no one in particular but which dragged everyone along in its wake in a sort of tacit agreement. The denouncing of madness became a general form of moral critique. In farces and soties, the character of the Fool, Idiot or Simpleton took on an ever-greater importance. He was no longer familiar and ridiculous, but exterior to the action, and took centre stage as the harbinger of truth, playing the complementary, inverse role of the figure of the fool in tales and satires. If madness drags everyone into a blindness where all bearings are lost, then the madman by contrast brings everyone back to their own truth. ” p.13
Culture in the middle ages: “Madness and the figure of the madman take on a new importance for the ambiguousness of their role: they are both threat and derision, the vertiginous unreason of the world, and the shallow ridiculousness of men.” p. 12, 13
“Madness too made an appearance in the academic arena, becoming a self-reflexive object of discourse. Madness was denounced and defended, and proclaimed to be nearer to happiness and truth than reason itself.” p. 13
Here, I see a parallel with autism. Persons with autism are ascribed special mental powers, and some discourses result in a challenge to what normality is.
Beautifully put logic
Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells. The death’s head showed itself to be a vessel already empty, for madness was the being-already-there of death.53 Death’s conquered presence, sketched out in these everyday signs, showed not only that its reign had already begun, but also that its prize was a meagre one. Death unmasked the mask of life, and nothing more: to show the skull beneath the skin it had no need to remove beauty or truth, but merely to remove the plaster of the tawdry clothes. The carnival mask and the cadaver share the same fixed smile. But the laugh of madness is an anticipation of the rictus grin of death, and the fool, that harbinger of the macabre, draws death’s sting.” p. 14, 15
“The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death is not the
sign of a rupture, but rather of a new twist within the same preoccupation.
It is still the nothingness of existence that is at stake, but this nothingness
is no longer experienced as an end exterior to being, a threat and a
conclusion: it is felt from within, as a continuous and unchanging form of
life. Whereas previously the madness of men had been their incapacity to
see that the end of life was always near, and it had therefore been necessary
to call them back to the path of wisdom by means of the spectacle of
death, now wisdom meant denouncing folly wherever it was to be found,
and teaching men that they were already no more than the legions of the
dead, and that if the end of life was approaching, it was merely a reminder
that a universal madness would soon unite with death.” p. 15
“It was no longer the end of time and the end of the world that would demonstrate that it was madness not to have worried about such things. Rather, the rise of madness, its insidious, creeping presence showed that the final catastrophe was always near: the madness of men brought it nigh and made it a foregone conclusion.” p. 15
Although it was still the case that the vocation of the Image was essentially to say, and its role was to transmit something that was consubstantial with language, the time had nonetheless come when it no longer said exactly the same thing. By its own means painting was beginning the long process of experimentation that would take it ever further from language, regardless of the superficial identity of a theme. Language and figure still illustrate the same fable of madness in the moral world, but they are beginning to take different directions, indicating, through a crack that was still barely perceptible, the great divide that was yet to come in the Western experience of madness.”
“But if knowledge is important for madness, it is not because madness might hold some vital secrets: on the contrary, it is the punishment for useless, unregulated knowledge. If it is the truth about knowledge, then all it reveals is
that knowledge is derisory, and that rather than addressing the great book
of experience, learning has become lost in the dust of books and in sterile
discussions, knowledge made mad by an excess of false science.” p. 22
“madness here is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man and his frailties, his dreams and illusions. The dark cosmic forces at work in madness that are so apparent in the work of Bosch are absent in Erasmus. Madness no longer lies in wait for man at every crossroads; rather, it slips into him, or is in fact a subtle relationship that man has with himself” p. 23