John Iliopoulos, Foucault, Baudrillard and the History of Madness, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Volume 10, Number 2 (July 2013)
Extract
I. Introduction
Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work altered our perception of psychiatry. Although generally labeled anti-psychiatric for its supposed narrative of exclusion of madness by the oppressive power of Enlightenment reason, its scope reaches far beyond the simple refutation of mental illness (Foucault, 1989: 418). It is a more radical cultural approach to the conditions of possibility of current psychiatric practice in the west. It is at once a historical, philosophical and anthropological endeavor which explores the foundations of psychiatric rationality and displays its epistemological, ethical and political limitations. Foucault’s historical analyses of madness havecreated a new type of critique which, instead of attacking the relations of domination inside the psychiatric institution or the objectivity of psychiatric discourse, they question the very conditions which shape our stable images of power relations and the universality of the medical model governing psychiatric practice.
In this paper I show how Baudrillard follows closely Foucault’s line of reasoning. He too carries out a cultural and anthropological study which repeats, revives and extends Foucault’s analyses of madness. Like Foucault, he performs a genealogy of western reason to illustrate the evolution of the prevalent rational schemas which have determined a specific relationship of western culture with its limits. Baudrillard’s sociological reflections are permeated by the social and cultural division between reason and madness, and, while less focused on the analysis of the psychiatric institution itself, they take up and deepen Foucault’s observations, exploring the fate of madness in contemporary societies of the west, contributing to critical psychiatry, which is not part of anti-psychiatry but a more radical type of critique of the psychiatric institution and its operation inside the wider context of today’s global rationality.
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With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link
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