The Foucault Ships
Psychoanalysis and moreIllustration in four naves of the relationship of the western world with the madness developed by Michel Foucault in his essay "History of Madness in the Classical Age" published in 1964. The images are accompanied by excerpts from the book "Cartas desde la Casa de Orates".
The Nave of Fools
“Como algo ya ha avanzado la estación de las lluvias, al norte de Calcutta, mejor será que hagas retirar tus tropas del valle de Malietta, ahí quedan mas resguardados para el paso de los zancudos. Tu por supuesto te levantas donde mejor te plazca.”
(Textual transcript) Eduardo Johnson, 1828 in Cartas desde la Casa de Orates, Ed. by Angélica Lavín
The Tragic Nave symbolizes the anxiety that arose in European culture at the end of the Middle Ages on the subject of the madman as someone vertiginous and ambiguous that shows a truth and adjoins the mysteries and horror that contain death and everything unknowable. This connection between madness and nothing, knotted with force in the fifteenth century, will survive, according to Foucault, over time and can be found in the center of the classic experience of madness. The madman of the tragic conscience carries a truth that sensible people do not have access to, it is a character that can be feared and teased that can be interpreted as defenses against death and the unknown, but is also respected because that meaningless leads him to the mystical and acred. The tragic madness is related to the oneiric, the ominous, the enigmas, with the silence and the night, but also with the innocence of the human being in front of a Great Without Reason that drags him as an underground force would.
The Tragic Nave
“Cada instante, que, me va alejando de aquel año terrible, que, se ha ido, parece que la pesada nube que atormentó mi mente, va desaciendose en mil pedazos y aclarando la atmósfera tan obscura, que, en el delirio de mi incertidumbre, amenazó el naufragio de la barquilla, de mi existencia, cuando a cada momento, la sentía caer, al abismo de lo desconocido.”
(Textual transcript) Aurelio Gutiérrez, 1919 in Cartas desde la Casa de Orates, Ed. By Angélica Lavín.
The Tragic Nave symbolizes the anxiety that arose in European culture at the end of the Middle Ages on the subject of the madman as someone vertiginous and ambiguous that shows a truth and adjoins the mysteries and horror that contain death and everything unknowable. This connection between madness and nothing, knotted with force in the fifteenth century, will survive, according to Foucault, over time and can be found in the center of the classic experience of madness. The madman of the tragic conscience carries a truth that sensible people do not have access to, it is a character that can be feared and teased that can be interpreted as defenses against death and the unknown, but is also respected because that meaningless leads him to the mystical and sacred. The tragic madness is related to the oneiric, the ominous, the enigmas, with the silence and the night, but also with the innocence of the human being in front of a Great Without Reason that drags him as an underground force would.
The Critical Nave
“Disculpeme Madré, usted dira que la familia de la mujermia que sonson de mucho onor pero alomenos las mujeres sontodas mujeres sinberbuenzas i corrompidas y burrachas i tienen un primohermano que estuvo aquí en la casa de orates empleado i lomandaron cambiando por burracho i por ladron lopillaron que se estaba robando alos locos asta los calzetines.”
(Transcripción Textual) Juan Maira Harrison, 1931 en Cartas desde la Casa de Orates, Ed. Por Angélica Lavín
From this perspective, madness is linked to the human and not to the divine, far from showing a mystical truth or coming from the cosmos, which points out the weaknesses of human beings and therefore lives on earth. Here madness reigns in the easy, the light, in greed, in leisure, greed, in vices, adultery, I would say in excess. This madness is also related to the attachment to oneself and that is why the madman does not judge adjusted to the truth and falls into error.
The Nave of Classicism
“Así, es la vida moderna y parece que a Ud. La han puesto modernista y sigue a los primos en lo corazón de fiera y positivista. Vamos, pelados, orgullosos modernistas.”
(Textual transcript) Antonio Lara, 1930 in Cartas desde la Casa de Orates, Ed. by Angélica Lavín.
According to Foucault from the Classicism in the seventeenth century onwards, after the Renaissance, and especially from Descartes (1596-1650), madness is exiled from reason and can not exist if thought exists; that is to say, there can not be madness in a being that reasons. Descartes places madness on the side of the dream and of all forms of error. Madness exists as a negative of reason, a no-reason, when it is lost, madness enters the scene. From now on madness teaches nothing, does not contain truth and is not even the dangerous reversibility of Reason, according to the author, as it was in the Renaissance; it must disappear along with its scandals.
Landing in the House of Orates
“Además porqué oír solamente los acusadores? Y Ud. Cree Doctor que después de cinco meses en este Manicomio aquí mismo no se dudará de mi?”
(Transcripción Textual) Carolina Vial, 1931 en Cartas desde la Casa de Orates, Ed. Por Angélica Lavín.
At the end of the eighteenth century, in 1793, Pinel asked to remove the chains of the inmates in the Bicêtre asylum and then applied the same reforms in Salpêtrière in 1795. However, according to Foucault the mixed internment will not be clarified in Europe until the beginning of the XIX century, and the ambiguity between the ethical-culpable dimension on the one hand and the animal-monstrous and therefore innocent, will not solve it either the positivism "although it is true that it has simplified it: it has taken up the theme of animal madness and its innocence, in a theory of mental alienation as a pathological mechanism of nature; and by keeping the madman in that situation of internment invented by the classical period, he will maintain it obscurely, without confessing it, in the apparatus of moral coercion and of dominated reason "(Foucault 1964).
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