jules bastien-lepage (1848-1884)

Joan of Arc, 1879
Jules Bastien-Lepage (French, 1848–1884)
Oil on canvas; 100 x 110 in. (254 x 279.4 cm)
Gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1)

foucault's madness part two

(of many):

"...at a deeper level, we find a rigorous organization dependent on the faultless armature of a discourse. This discourse, in its logic, commands the firmest belief in itself, it advances by judgments and reasonings which connect together; it is a kind of reason in action. In short, under the chaotic and manifest delirium reigns the order of a secret delirium. In this second delirium, which is, in a sense, pure reason, reason delivered of all the external tinsel of dementia, is located the paradoxical truth of madness."

Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Connection: to Derrida's sense, in "Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone," of the inevitable proximity (the link) between fundamentalist and hypercritical thought. And with due caution to the distinction between religion and madness, as well as due attention to their shared discursive borders, see also Timothy Clark (on representing enthusiasm): “Ideas that sound a little like accounts of aporias in deconstructive thinking merge in bizarre ways with notions that rest on a religious or magical world view" (from The Theory of Inspiration).

foucault's madness part one

"Madness has ceased to be--at the limits of the world, of man and death--an eschatalogical figure; the darkness has dispersed on which the eyes of madness were fixed and out of which the forms of the impossible were born. Oblivion falls upon the world navigated by the free slaves of the Ship of Fools. Madness will no longer proceed from a point within the world to a point beyond, on its strange voyage; it will never again be that fugitive and absolute limit. Behold it moored now, made fast among things and men. Retained and maintained. No longer a ship but a hospital."

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

to do

To do: the limits of regionalism. outer bounds. politics of the periphery.

To imagine: the work of sound.

irony and ecstasy

"The anti-rhetoric of Hawthorne, which defends him against sentimentality, also prevents him from rendering sensuality, dissolving all ecstasies in ironies."

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)

Ecstasy as sediment, reserve, reaction; ecstasy as experience, unmoored.