Michel Foucault Quotes About Madness

Quotes about: Madness

• Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

  Michel Foucault

  Night, Vanity, Light

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.111, Vintage

• The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

  Michel Foucault

  Madness, Language, Reason

  "History of Madness".

• And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world - a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.

  Michel Foucault

  Spiritual, Ignorance, Anchors

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.12, Vintage

• Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

  Michel Foucault

  Time, Art, Madness

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.273, Psychology Press

• When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.

  Michel Foucault

  Dark, Night, Men

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.20, Psychology Press

• In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge

  Michel Foucault

  Fall, Men, Secret

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.12, Vintage

• What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.

  Michel Foucault

  Division, Action, Madness

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.9, Vintage

• The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

  Michel Foucault

  Broken, Silence, Syntax

  Michel Foucault, Keith Hoeller, Ludwig Binswanger, Jacob Needleman (1984). “Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry”

• In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.

  Michel Foucault

  Distance, Eye, Animal

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.66, Psychology Press

• Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

  Michel Foucault

  Essentials, Limits, Sovereign

• One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

  Michel Foucault

  Men, Madness, Problem

  Michel Foucault (2005). “The Order of Things”, p.421, Routledge

• Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.

  Michel Foucault

  Secret, Madness, Chimera

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.27, Psychology Press

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