This is a nice summary of a great work by Michel Foucault, something very close to my own thinking.
from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“The History of Madness… much of the work is concerned with the birth of medical psychiatry, which Foucault associates with extraordinary changes in the treatment of the mad in modernity, meaning first their systematic exclusion from society in early modernity, followed by their pathologization
in late modernity.. with Foucault ultimately finding that madness is negatively constitutive of Enlightenment reason via its exclusion. The exclusion of unreason itself, concomitant with the physical exclusion of the mad, is effectively the dark side of the valorization of reason in modernity… Foucault argues in effect for the recuperation of madness, via a valorization of philosophers and artists deemed mad, such as Nietzsche, a recuperation which Foucault thinks the works of such men already portend.”
Monthly Archives: December 2024
Derrida’s Alterity
I feel a lot of sympathy with Derrida’s idea of the “messianic structure of existence.” He describes this as the general idea of an approaching future alterity, a future which, as it is not yet invented, is so different from what we are accustomed to that it cannot even be conceptualized. I have had a sense of something similar for some time, and bring this into much of my work, though I have never had any idea where this sense of a future containing something so radically different comes from, other than the general sense of the Western rationalist outlook being unsustainable. Like Derrida, I believe all we can do is try to break down the current paradigm in order to allow this impossible future to appear.
Here’s what Derrida says:
“I am careful to say ‘let it come’ because if the other is precisely what is not invented, the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, in uncloseting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage toward the other”:
East Of The Sun Philosophy 