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Review Summary: "Imagination is not madness." |
Date: 2008-08-02 |
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Details: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is one of those books that you are meant to have read in graduate school. It is also one of those books that I have read citations from, seen passages from, heard discussed, heard argued about and generally felt bad that I had never gotten around to reading. It's been sitting on my shelf for at least five years, I must admit.
I don't think that I need to say very much about the book itself. Foucault studies attitudes towards insanity throughout history, with particular attention to how the treatment of the mad was reflected by the current popular narrative about madness. The book is often cited as being against psychiatric institutions. After reading it, I tend to see that as an overstatement. I think that he is more or less simply raising the question as to whether what we see as "scientific" treatments for mental illness are not actually bearing out implicit societal biases about the nature of this kind of disease. In the model he examines, the romanticization of madness is dangerous but so is a view of madness as lack of discipline or moral fibre (for example). I think that it would be dangerous to extrapolate too much authorial meaning from the way that he addresses the subject.
I have read Foucault before, and I nearly always have the same reaction to his work. While he was clearly a brilliant man and while he has many interesting things to say, I do sometimes find there to be something quite glib about his thinking. Even here, in what is possibly his most famous work, there are moments where I felt as though he was poised to really dive into something interesting and instead moves on. Certainly thought-provoking, I will admit. But still somehow Madness and Civilization was not entirely satisfying.
I wish that he had included a bibliography. Also, he discusses so much about painting that it would be useful for the edition to contain a few prints. But these are minor quibbles. |
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Review Summary: Defining madness is a subjective thing... |
Date: 2008-05-25 |
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Details: When I first saw the book's title, I imagined it would be a book about psychiatric hospitals and many psychopaths' stories.
I was wrong.
It is much more than just that.
Madness and civilization, is a book that explores the history of mental illness and how it was defined since the 16th century.
The book takes to through history and reveals a story not known to most.
How the first considered crazy people were thieves and homeless people, then leapers, and slowly it became what it is today.
Though very interesting, the book is also a bit hard too read. it is a book that gives a lot of knowledge, but not a lot of plot. So unless you are looking to learn about the historical p.o.v of madness, do not take it.
However, if you are, you will not regret it.
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Review Summary: A Great Choice for the First-Time Foucault Reader |
Date: 2008-02-22 |
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Details: If you are looking to get into Foucault, this is a great place to start. It's a wonderful introduction to the concepts and themes that characterize this brilliant man's work, but the prose is far less dense than that of his later works. |
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Review Summary: exorcised mental clutter and fantasy that deluded my mind! |
Date: 2007-04-11 |
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Details: The scope of this book is very broad, and while parts of it were tedious for me to read... the parts that benefited me most are likely to be parts that other people find tedious! Foucault's ambitious attempt to tackle so many aspects of our civilizations relationship with madness makes this a book that is not likely to entertain every reader from front to back, but I highly recommend it because the parts that did appeal to me were extremely insightful and actually had a genuine effect on my life.
Foucault discusses madness as the psychological state of a person who becomes engrossed by fantasy to the point where they cannot function in the everyday world. He cites a beautiful image from medieval European art- a bird with a long and delicate neck, symbolic of the time that thoughts take to get from the heart to the mind during contemplation. To demonstrate his concept of madness Foucault poetically warps this image into a bird with a neck so long that it piles up and weaves into a spaghetti-like mess. He states that madness often occurs because... people think too much!
People can become guided by or preoccupied by ideas that are from removed from everyday experience (e.g. a principle based on a theory informed by an idea extrapolated from another persons idea inspired by a theory derived from a principle that refuted an idea stating a theory hypothesized based on an observation... oh, and can we even trust the tools we use to observe the world through?). What I found most ironic while reading this book is that a good number of intellectuals and academics, going by Foucault's principle outlined above, might be considered mad because the ivory tower can be so far removed from the everyday world that people lose their grounding.
Ultimately, I found this book had a profound book on me because it worked as a sort of exorcism. At the time the book found it's way to me I had been heavily wrapped in metaphysical and occult preoccupations, and reading this book made me reconsider how much I know through first hand experience and how much am fantasy have I generated based on hearsay.
In this excellent and interesting history of madness in Western civilization Foucault examines how powerful institutions have operated in response to the irrational, and how the issue has been approached during different eras. How is madness defined, handled and treated- through the Renaissance theory of humours (surprisingly I found this very interesting, if even only for Foucault's explanation of this mystifying topic), to contemporary psychiatric methods (also, Foucault delves into the ways that these different models evolve from one into another). For people who need a bit of sensational spectacle or disturbing gore, the descriptions of asylums and confinement for patients creates a pretty graphic picture of the conditions people have endured during "treatment". |
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Review Summary: Try the newest edition - April 2007 |
Date: 2007-04-01 |
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Details: A new edition w footnotes, etc. is out.
Here is a review:
"Foucault the Historian [Mark Bauerlein]
A new translation of the book that launched Michel Foucault's international fame has just come out. The book is Madness and Civilization, and the first translation back in 1965 was a shortened version of the original French publication. When it appeared in English, it was a sensation, and its thesis against Enlightenment reason found fans throughout the social sciences and humanities. Missing in the English version were several chapters and more than a thousand footnotes, and what remained was a sweeping indictment of the human sciences, large claims about the nature of madness and normalcy, and the transition into modernity. People loved it, and to anybody passing through graduate school in the last 30 years Foucault was a Pantheonic figure. It is hard, indeed, to communicate to outsiders just how powerfully Foucault's work and thought gripped substantial and powerful cliques in the academy.
The current translation includes the material left out of the earlier translation, and it offers an entirely different picture of the book. In a word, it includes all the historiographical labor that grounds the grandiloquent theses--all the books Foucault read and cited, the original documents he gathered, his representations of concrete historical situations, the latest scholarship he consulted on the issues.
But there's a problem, and this new version lays it out in detail. The scholarship is a mess. Foucault attributes positions to documents that are not to be found there. He takes dubious 19th-century sources at face value. He gets basic facts wrong. He ignores recent scholarship. The most celebrated and revered historian of the last 50 years, a presiding deity of cultural studies, an icon of gender theory, interdisciplinarity, and poststructuralism, it turns out, committed one historiographical crime after another to push a counter-Enlightenment thesis." |
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out of 19 Reviews
