the disorder of things

Jacques Rancière, Let Mots de l'histoire (The Names of History):

"The human and social sciences are children of the scientific age: the age of a certain number of decisive revolutions in the fundamental sciences; but also the age of scientific belief, the age that conceives of rationality that has no necessary connection to the revolutions in question. But--we forget this too easily--the age of science is also that of literature, that in which the latter names itself as such and separates the rigor of its own action from the simple enchantments of fiction, as with rules on the division of poetic genres and procedures suited to belles lettres. It is finally--we 'know' this more and more--the age of democracy, the age in which democracy appears, even in the eyes of those who combat or fear it, as the social destiny of modern politics; it is the age of broad masses and great regularities that lend themselves to the calculations of science, but also that of a new disorder and arbitrariness that disturb objective rigors." (8-9)

Eugène Delacroix, "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (1831)

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).