A conversation on madness: Foucault and Ripa

Abstract

Written as a fictitious dialogue between two of this generation’s most prolific social theorists, this unique analysis explores the similarities and divergences of Michel Foucault’s and Yannick Ripa’s scholarship on madness. During an imagined meeting at a local café, a spirited dialogue emerges addressing mutual agreement and unwavering criticism of each author’s perspective of how madness was constructed and managed throughout the classical and Victorian eras. Ripa’s primary motive is to challenge Foucault for ignoring the feminine critique within his over-arching theories of social and patriarchal systems of control. On the other hand, Foucault’s vested interest is to explore Ripa’s narrowed historical scope that he feels was essentially built upon his own scholarship without acknowledgement. Drawing upon a comparative study of Foucault’s History of Madness and Ripa’s Women and Madness, the two theorists engage in a revealing conversation about aspects of political economy, shifting roles of religious ideology, gender effects, the social construction of insanity, and the historical methods of incarceration.

Keywords:

• madness
• political economy
• social construction
• incarceration
• Foucault
• Ripa

Notes

1. Felicia Gordon (1989) critiqued Ripa for not acknowledging her predecessors’ theoretical groundwork in the development of her own perspective on madness.

2. Finkelstein (1980) was the first disability scholar to situate disability within a materialist framework linking industrialization to economic disablement.

3. Oliver (1990) wrote a seminal text, The Politics of Disablement, in which he discusses the rise of capitalism as a defining factor in perpetuating disablement.

4. Gleeson (1999) wrote extensively on welfare states and disability. He attributed the effects of unemployment within market economies to both incarceration and poverty.

5. Scull (2007) accused Foucault (1965) of misrepresenting historical accounts within his text Madness and Civilization.

6. Margaret Atwood (2009), a prolific Canadian writer, wrote a number of speculative fiction novels addressing issues of environment, corporatism, neo-liberalism as well as the demise of market economies and the societies in which they proliferate.

7. Cormac McCarthy (2006), a noted American writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road in which he explored conceptions of humanity in a post-apocalyptic society.

8. Thomas Szasz is a psychiatrist who wrote about the unnecessary medicalization of human and psychic attributes in his book The Myth of Mental Illness (Szasz 2010, originally published 1974).

9. Erving Goffman (1961) wrote of the social and political functions served by the asylum, including the process by which inmates are stripped of their civil identities and rights.