Neither Violent nor Tranquil: How to Reconceive the Animal-Human Relation on the Basis of Foucault's History of Madness

References

• There may of course be a variety of tactics, or at least there seems to be two major tactics. On the one hand, there is an inflationary tactic: one tries to add a property of man to animals, which would result in a de-hierarchization. On the other, there is a deflationary tactic: one tries to remove a property from man, which would likewise result in a de-hierarchization.
   Google Scholar
• Aristotle, Politica, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957) 1253a 9–10
   Google Scholar
• Michel Foucault, L'histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1972), p. 108; English translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khlafa as The History of Madness (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 77. Hereafter cited with the abbreviation HF, with reference first to the French, then to the English translation. The English translation has been frequently modified. I am referring to and modifying the 2006 hardback edition of the English translation. Apparently, the 2009 paperback edition contains some corrections to the English translation. The following secondary sources have been consulted in the writing of this essay: Jeremy Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporeality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000); Fréderic Gros, Foucault et la folie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997); Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986); English translation by Seán Hand as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie,” in L'écriture et la différence (Paris: Points Seuil, 1976), pp. 51–98; English translation by Alan Bass as “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63; Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Lynn Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Edward F. McGushin, Foucault's Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
   Google Scholar
• This question might seem to contradict Foucault's description of his thinking as a “happy positivism.” Cf. Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours, (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971), p. 72; English translation as “The Discourse on Language,” in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 234. However, the type of positivism to which Foucault refers here (and throughout The Archaeology of Knowledge) functions at a level smaller (at the “micro” level) than scientific positivity. Being smaller, this kind of positivity contains the potentiality of change. Or, more precisely, it opens the possibility of freedom.
   Google Scholar
• The Classical Age runs from the time of Descartes’ Meditations (in 1641) to the time of Kant (in the 1780s), or, in other words, to the Enlightenment. In fact, Foucault also provides us with political historical markers for the period: Louis XIV's edict of 1653—the edict of Nantes—for the confinement of the indigent and Philippe Pinel's liberation of the mad from the Bicêtre hospital in 1793, a liberation that is one of the episodes from the French Revolution. Foucault also calls the Classical Age “the age of understanding” (l'âge de l'entendement) in order to emphasize the idea of a division. See HF 225/171; 265/206.
   Google Scholar
• That is, during the Classical Age, there was the practice of interning the mad in “General Hospitals” across France, but this practice did not produce knowledge of the mad. Correlatively, medical thought developed knowledge of the mad by classifying phenomena of madness, but it did not engage in any dialogue with those interned. For Foucault, the division ended up confining the madman as subject but as a subject who was bestial and counter-natural, while at the same time turning the madman into an object of investigation, eventually determining the truth of the madman as something wholly natural and positive.
   Google Scholar
• At this moment, “transcendence” is a positive term for Foucault, meaning “going beyond”; Foucault's use of the term in the History of Madness resembles Heidegger's use of the term. See especially HF 304/238.
   Google Scholar
• Foucault in these discussions uses the verb “éprouver.“ See, for example, HF 140/102.
   Google Scholar
• This quote is from the 1961 Preface, p. xxxiv of the History of Madness. The French is found in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), pp. 187–195. This citation is found on p. 194. Foucault makes a similar comment in the book's final chapter (HF 653/529).
   Google Scholar
• Here Foucault refers to Jacques-René Tenon's Mémoires sur les hôpitaux de Paris.
   Google Scholar
• The phrase “take some distance” translates the word Foucault uses to describe this new semi-freedom: “recul” (recoil or withdrawal, taking some distance) (HF 543/435).
   Google Scholar
• Here Foucault refers to Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis.
   Google Scholar
• This idea is developed by Cabanis, according to Foucault.
   Google Scholar
• See HF 565–69/453–57. Here Foucault describes a court case for a crime of passion; he is interested in the defence made by Bellart.
   Google Scholar
• Foucault shows how religion plays a large role in this operation of fear.
   Google Scholar
• Later Foucault takes up the idea that punishment aims at the soul, not the body, in Discipline and Punish. See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Tel Gallimard, 1975), p. 24; English translation by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 16.
   Google Scholar
• Georges Auguste Couthon (1755–1974) was the President of the “Convention” and aided in Robespierre's Terror; he was also a paralytic.
   Google Scholar
• Clearly, one of the purposes of Foucault's History of Madness lies in showing that Pinel's famous 1794 liberation of the mad at Bicêtre Hospital is a myth. Below this myth, we see Pinel put into place operations that in fact enslave the mad worse than during the time of the “Great Confinement.” These operations are silence, mirror reflections, and perpetual judgment.
   Google Scholar
• Here, Foucault is quoting Boissier de Sauvages.
   Google Scholar
• The word “violence” does not appear in this discussion, but it is clear that the “rage” of the beast indicates the violence that on other pages in The History of Madness describes animality. See, for example, HF 63–64/41; also HF 203/150; HF 543–44/435.
   Google Scholar
• Michel Foucault, “Préface à la Transgression,” in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), p. 266; English translation by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon as “Preface to Transgression,” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 74. See Immanuel Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy,” in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, translated and edited by David Walford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 205–241.
   Google Scholar
• Michel Foucault, “La pensée du dehors,” in Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2001), pp. 546–567; English translation by Brian Massumi as “The Thought of the Outside,” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2, pp. 147–169.
   Google Scholar
• E. Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique & Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (Paris: Vrin, 2009); English translation by Roberto Nigo as Introduction to Kant's Anthropology (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2008). Michel Foucault, L'Hermeneutique du sujet, Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982 (Paris: Seuil Gallimard, 2001); English translation by Graham Burchell as The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
   Google Scholar
• Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. 1. Abteilung: Veröffentlich Schriften 1910–1976. Band 9. Wegmarken. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004), pp. 73–97, especially, p. 88; English translation by John Sallis as “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed., William McNeil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 136–154, in particular, p. 147.
   Google Scholar
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Kritische Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Massino Montinari (München: de Gruyter), pp. 308–309; English translation by Walter Kaufmann as On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 508–509.
   Google Scholar