on the madness of the real

Excising the Stone of Folly, Pieter Huys, c. 1530-1581

"This, then, is Derrida’s fundamental interpretive gesture: the one of 'separating, within the Cogito, on the one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite and determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the HusserlianCogito as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure' (60).

"Here, when Derrida asserts that '/t/he historicity proper to philosophy is located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and the finite structure, /…/ in the difference between history and historicity' (60), he is perhaps too short. This tension may appear very 'Lacanian': is it not a version of the tension between the Real – the hyperbolic excess – and its (ultimately always failed) symbolization? The matrix we thus arrive at is the one of the eternal oscillation between the two extremes, the radical expenditure, hyperbole, excess, and its later domestification (like Kristeva, between Semiotic and Symbolic...). Illusionary are both extremes: pure excess as well as pure finite order would disintegrate, cancel themselves... This misses the true point of 'madness,' which is not the pure excess of the Night of the World, but the madness of the passage to the Symbolic itself, of imposing a symbolic order onto the chaos of the Real. (Like Freud, who, in his Schreber analysis, points out how the paranoiac 'system' is not madness, but a desperate attempt to ESCAPE madness – the disintegration of the symbolic universe - through an ersatz, as if, universe of meaning.) If madness is constitutive, then EVERY system of meaning is minimally paranoiac, 'mad.'"

Slavov Zizek, "Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault, and then Lacan"

the action of lightning

Bataille on the festival:

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and this this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.

[...]

The divine world is contagious and its contagion is dangerous. In theory, what is started in the operation of sacrifice is like the action of lightning: in theory there is no limit to the conflagration."

In relation to Durkheim on effervescence and the deification of society:

Deification of society (pursues ends beyond the individual), dominion over consciences: moral authority. Worked out in common, intensity of acceptance in individual mind: echoes reciprocally in all other minds. Psychic properties. Collective force not entirely external, integral to our being (made up in and by individual consciences).

“Invigorating influence” of society, especially at certain moments, e.g. August 4th, 1789: debate over feudal rights, “legal form given to the resolution of a principles made in a moment of collective enthusiasm,” later called night of the Dupes, St. Bartholomew’s night massacre of the estates (August Decree).

Refurbishing of common faith by manifesting it in common, *attitude particular to man addressing the crowd…form of grandiloquence absurd elsewhere, effective in context. “Even his ideas lose all sense of proportion and easily fall into every kind of excess.” “Abnormal plethora of forces,” oratorical inspiration: forces derive from the group, rebounded, amplified feeling, reverberation, the group “incarnate and personified.”

"[...] general effervescence characteristic of revolutionary or creative periods."

Forces: each form in our conscience two circles of mental states, two sorts of reality (sacred, profane things).

Early years of French Revolution, under influence of general enthusiasm, things secular transformed by public opinion (The Motherland, Liberty, Reason) become religion established with dogma, holy days, altars, symbols, etc. Patriotic enthusiasm. Collective action: sensation of the sacred.