Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

%% Z72W4XSY ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Then in the last years of the century this enormous uneasiness turns on itself; the mockery of madness replaces death and its solemnity." (p. 24 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% PKFZAJQB ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form." (p. 26 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% S4Y5UTQU ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The Middle Ages had given madness, or folly, a place in the hierarchy of vices. Beginning with the thirteenth century, it is customarily ranked among the wicked soldiers of the psychomachy. It figures, at Paris as at Amiens, among the evil soldiery, and is among the twelve dualities that dispute the sovereignty of the human soul: Faith and Idolatry, Hope and Despair, Charity and Avarice, Chastity and Lust, Prudence and Folly, Patience and Anger, Gentleness and Harshness, Concord and Discord, Obedience and Rebellion, Perseverance and Inconstancy, Fortitude and Cowardice, Humility and Pride. In the Renaissance, Folly leaves this modest place and comes to the fore. Whereas according to Hugues de Saint-Victor the genealogical tree of the Vices, that of the Old Adam, had pride as its root, Folly now leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses." (p. 30 | 18-10-2026) Note: so it seems at this point folly was just one of many vices %%end%%

%% 36N7S4QI ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "fascinate. It rules all that is easy, joyous, frivolous in the world. It is madness, folly, which makes men “sport and rejoice,” as it has given the gods “Genius, Beauty, Bacchus, Silenus, and the gentle guardian of gardens.”6 All within it is brilliant surface: no enigma is concealed.No doubt, madness has something to do with the strange paths of knowledge. The first canto of Brant’s poem is devoted to books and scholars; and in the engraving which illustrates this passage in the Latin edition of 1497, we see enthroned upon his bristling cathedra of books the Magister who wears behind his doctoral cap a fool’s cap sewn with bells. Erasmus, in his dance of fools, reserves a large place for scholars: after the Grammarians, the Poets, Rhetoricians, and Writers, come the Jurists; after them, the “Philosophers respectable in beard and mantle”; finally the numberless troop of the Theologians. But if knowledge is so important in madness, it is not because the latter can control the secrets of knowledge; on the contrary, madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science. If madness" (p. 31 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% LOAX3GRW ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "popular satire, madness appears here as the comic punishment of knowledge and its ignorant presumption.In a general way, then, madness is not linked to the world and its subterranean forms, but rather to man, to his weaknesses, dreams, and illusions. Whatever obscure cosmic manifestation there was in madness as seen by Bosch is wiped out in Erasmus; madness no longer lies in wait for mankind at the four corners of the earth; it insinuates itself within man, or rather it is a subtle rapport that man maintains with himself. The mythological personification of madness in Erasmus is only a literary device. In fact, only “follies” exist—human forms of madness: “I count as many images as there are men”; one need only glance at states, even the wisest and best governed: “So many forms of madness abound there, and each day sees so many new ones born, that a thousand Democrituses would not suffice to mock them.” There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains." (p. 32 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% U6ACH6IW ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive." (p. 33 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% G5YWLBW6 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly.” Madness is no longer the familiar foreignness of the world; it is merely a commonplace spectacle for the foreign spectator; no longer a figure of the cosmos, but a characteristic of the aevum.But a new enterprise was being undertaken that would abolish the tragic experience of madness in a critical consciousness. Let us ignore this phenomenon for the moment and consider indiscriminately those figures to be found in Don Quixote as well as in Scudery’s novels, in King Lear as well as in the theater of Jean de Rotrou or Tristan l’Hermite.Let us begin with the most important, and the most durable—since the eighteenth century will still recognize its only just erased forms: madness by romantic identification. Its features have been fixed once and for all by Cervantes. But the theme is tirelessly repeated: direct adaptations (the Don Quichotte of Guérin de Bouscal was performed in 1639; two years later, he staged Le Gouvernement de Sancho Pança), reinterpretations of a particular episode (Pichou’s Les Folies de Cardenio is a variation on the theme of the “Ragged Knight” of the Sierra Morena), or, in a more indirect fashion, satire on novels of fantasy (as in Subligny’s La Fausse Clélie, and within the story itself, as in the episode of Julie d’Arviane). The chimeras are transmitted from author to reader, but what was fantasy on one side becomes hallucination on the other; the writer’s stratagem is quite naïvely accepted as an image of reality. In appearance, this is nothing but the simple-minded critique of novels of fantasy, but just under the surface lies an enormous anxiety concerning the relationships, in a work of art, between the real and the imaginary, and perhaps also concerning the confused communication between fantastic invention and the fascinations of delirium. “We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.”8 Madness, in which the values of another age, another art, another morality are called into question, but which also reflects—blurred and disturbed, strangely compromised by one another in a common chimera—all the forms, even the most remote, of the human imagination.Immediately following this first form: the madness of vain presumption. But it is not with a literary model that the madman identifies; it is with himself, and by means of a delusive attachment that enables him to grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers he lacks. He inherits the old Philautia of Erasmus. Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself; with chains still on his feet, he takes himself for God. Such a one was Osuma’s master of arts who believed he was Neptune.9 Such is the ridiculous fate of the seven characters of Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Les Visionnaires,of Chateaufort in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Le Pédant joué, of M. de Richesource in Sir Politik. Measureless madness, which has as many faces as the world has characters, ambitions, and necessary illusions. Even in its extremities, this is the least extreme of madnesses; it is, in the heart of every man, the imaginary relation he maintains with himself. It engenders the commonest of his faults. To denounce it is the first and last element of all moral criticism.To the moral world, also, belongs the madness of just punishment, which chastises, along with the disorders of the mind, those of the heart. But it has still other powers: the punishment it inflicts multiplies by nature insofar as, by punishing itself, it unveils the truth. The justification of this madness is that it is truthful. Truthful since the sufferer already experiences, in the vain whirlwind of his hallucinations, what will for all eternity be the pain of his punishment: Éraste, in Corneille’s Mélite, sees himself already pursued by the Eumenides and condemned by Minos. Truthful, too, because the crime hidden from all eyes dawns like day in the night of this strange punishment; madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth; its cries speak for its conscience. Thus Lady Macbeth’s delirium reveals to those who “have known what they should not” words long uttered only to “dead pillows.”Then the last type of madness: that of desperate passion. Love disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium. Punishment of a passion too abjectly abandoned to its violence? No doubt; but this punishment is also a relief; it spreads, over the irreparable absence, the mercy of imaginary presences; it recovers, in the paradox of innocent joy or in the heroism of senseless pursuits, the vanished form. If it leads to death, it is a death in which the lovers will never be separated again. This is Ophelia’s last song, this is the delirium of Ariste in La Folie du sage. But above all, this is the bitter and sweet madness of King Lear." (p. 34 | 18-10-2026) Note: types of madness %%end%%

%% MH3IPJ7I ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Here each form of madness finds its proper place, its distinguishing mark, and its tutelary divinity: frenzied and ranting madness, symbolized by a fool astride a chair, struggles beneath Minerva’s gaze; the somber melancholics that roam the countryside, solitary and avid wolves, have as their god Jupiter, patron of animal metamorphoses; then come the “mad drunkards,” the “madmen deprived of memory and understanding,” the “madmen benumbed and half-dead,” the “madmen of giddy and empty heads” … All this world of disorder, in perfect order, pronounces, each in his turn, the Praise of Reason. Already, in this “Hospital,” confinement has succeeded embarkation." (p. 40 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% HK5INGXD ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "From the middle of the seventeenth century, madness was linked with this country of confinement, and with the act which designated confinement as its natural abode.A date can serve as a landmark: 1656, the decree that founded, in Paris, the Hôpital Général. At first glance, this is merely a reform—little more than an administrative reorganization. Several already existing establishments are grouped under a single administration: the Salpêtriere, rebuilt under the preceding reign to house an arsenal; Bicêtre, which Louis XIII had wanted to give to the Commandery of Saint Louis as a rest home for military invalids; “the House and the Hospital of La Pitié, the larger as well as the smaller, those of Le Refuge, situated in the Faubourg Saint-Victor, the House and Hospital of Scipion, the House of La Savonnerie, with all the lands, places, gardens, houses, and buildings thereto appertaining.”1 All were now assigned to the poor of Paris “of both sexes, of all ages and from all localities, of whatever breeding and birth, in whatever state they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable.” These establishments had to accept, lodge, and feed those who presented themselves or those sent by royal or judicial authority; it was also necessary to assure the subsistence, the appearance, and the general order of those who could not find room, but who might or who deserved to be there. This responsibility was entrusted to directors appointed for life, who exercised their powers, not only in the buildings of the Hôpital but throughout the city of Paris, over all those who came under their jurisdiction: “They have all power of authority, of direction, of administration, of commerce, of police, of jurisdiction, of correction and punishment over all the poor of Paris, both within and without the Hopital General.” The directors also appointed a doctor at a salary of one thousand livres a year; he was to reside at La Pitie, but had to visit each of the houses of the Hôpital twice a week." (p. 42 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% BZNRQB26 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "It is common knowledge that the seventeenth century created enormous houses of confinement; it is less commonly known that more than one out of every hundred inhabitants of the city of Paris found themselves confined there, within several months. It is common knowledge that absolute power made use of lettres de cachet and arbitrary measures of imprisonment; what is less familiar is the judicial conscience that could inspire such practices. Since Pinel, Tuke, Wagnitz, we know that madmen were subjected to the regime of this confinement for a century and a half, and that they would one day be discovered in the wards of the Hôpital Général, in the cells of prisons; they would be found mingled with the population of the workhouses or Zuchthäusern. But it has rarely been made clear what their status was there, what the meaning was of this proximity which seemed to assign the same homeland to the poor, to the unemployed, to prisoners, and to the insane. It is within the walls of confinement that Pinel and nineteenth-century psychiatry would come upon madmen; it is there—let us remember—that they would leave them, not without boasting of having “delivered” them. From the middle of the seventeenth century, madness was linked with this country of confinement, and with the act which designated confinement as its natural abode." (p. 42 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% SPQAE3RK ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "“The directors having for these purposes stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons in the said Hôpital Général and the places thereto appertaining so much as they deem necessary, no appeal will be accepted from the regulations they establish within the said hospital; and as for such regulations as intervene from without, they will be executed according to their form and tenor, notwithstanding opposition or whatsoever appeal made or to be made, and without prejudice to these, and for which, notwithstanding all defense or suits for justice, no distinction will be made.”2 A quasi-absolute sovereignty, jurisdiction without appeal, a writ of execution against which nothing can prevail—the Hôpital Général is a strange power that the King establishes between the police and the courts, at the limits of the law: a third order of repression. The insane whom Pinel would find at Bicêtre and at La Salpêtrière belonged to this world." (p. 43 | 18-10-2026) Note: this is where we come from? why we have such strict laws? %%end%%

%% VHLKZJCM ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Over the entire face of France, hôpitaux généraux were opened; on the eve of the Revolution, they were to be found in thirty-two provincial cities." (p. 45 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% QQWIXCXC ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "In several years, an entire network had spread across Europe. John Howard, at the end of the eighteenth century, undertook to investigate it; in England, Holland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, he made pilgrimages to all the chief centers of confinement—“hospitals, prisons, jails”—and his philanthropy was outraged by the fact that the same walls could contain those condemned by common law, young men who disturbed their families’ peace or who squandered their goods, people without profession, and the insane. Proof that even at this period, a certain meaning had been lost: that which had so hastily, so spontaneously summoned into being all over Europe the category of classical order we call confinement. In a hundred and fifty years, confinement had become the abusive amalgam of heterogeneous elements. Yet at its origin, there must have existed a unity which justified its urgency; between these diverse forms and the classical period that called them into being, there must have been a principle of cohesion we cannot evade under the scandal of pre-Revolutionary sensibility. What, then, was the reality represented by this entire population which almost overnight found itself shut up, excluded more severely than the lepers?" (p. 47 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% K7TZ2UW4 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception." (p. 47 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% H7245DYW ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "When Henri IV began the siege of Paris, the city, which had less than 100,000 inhabitants, contained more than 30,000 beggars." (p. 49 | 18-10-2026) Note: he folly are put in the same box as the beggars %%end%%

%% O6Q7NDL4 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "It is this entire, rather undifferentiated mass at which the edict of 1657 is aimed: a population without resources, without social moorings, a class rejected or rendered mobile by new economic developments. Less than two weeks after it was signed, the edict was read and proclaimed in the streets. Paragraph 9: “We expressly prohibit and forbid all persons of either sex, of any locality and of any age, of whatever breeding and birth, and in whatever condition they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable, to beg in the city and suburbs of Paris, neither in the churches, nor at the doors of such, nor at the doors of houses nor in the streets, nor anywhere else in public, nor in secret, by day or night … under pain of being whipped for the first offense, and for the second condemned to the galleys if men and boys, banished if women and girls." (p. 50 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% ZRHDYP22 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "In 1630, the King established a commission to assure the rigorous observance of the Poor Laws. That same year, it published a series of “orders and directions”; it recommended prosecuting beggars and vagabonds, as well as “all those who live in idleness and will not work for reasonable wages or who spend what they have in taverns.” They must be punished according to law and placed in houses of correction; as for those with wives and children, investigation must be made as to whether they were married and their children baptized, “for these people live like savages without being married, nor buried, nor baptized; and it is this licentious liberty which causes so many to rejoice in vagabondage.”" (p. 51 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% NQJR7NU4 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "poor sharply increased, the houses of confinement regained, at least for a time, their initial economic significance. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there was another great crisis: 12,000 begging workers at Rouen and as many at Tours; at Lyons the manufactories closed. The Count d’Argenson, “who commands the department of Paris and the marshalseas,” gave orders “to arrest all the beggars of the kingdom; the marshalseas will perform this task in the countryside, while the same thing is done in Paris, whither they are sure not to return, being entrapped on all sides.”But outside of the periods of crisis, confinement acquired another meaning. Its repressive function was combined with a new use. It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work, but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all. The alternation is clear: cheap manpower in the periods of full employment and high salaries; and in periods of unemployment, reabsorption of the idle and social protection against agitation and uprisings. Let us not forget that the first houses of confinement appear in England in the most industrialized parts of the country: Worcester, Norwich, Bristol; that the first hôpital général was opened in Lyons, forty years before that of Paris; that Hamburg was the first German city to have its Zuchthaus, in 1620. Its regulations, published in 1622, were quite precise. The internees must all work. Exact record was kept of the value of their work, and they were paid a fourth of it. For work was not only an occupation; it must be productive. The eight directors of the house established a general plan. The Werkmeister assigned a task to each, and ascertained at the end of the week that it had been accomplished. The rule of work would remain in effect until the end of the eighteenth century, since John Howard could still attest that they were “knitting and spinning; weaving stockings, linen, hair, and wool—and rasping logwood and hartshorn. The quota of a robust man who shreds such wood is forty-five pounds a day." (p. 51 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% 7HIPPFNC ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "“All the poor who are capable of working must, upon work days, do what is necessary to avoid idleness, which is the mother of all evils, as well as to accustom them to honest toil and also to earning some part of their sustenance.”" (p. 53 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% 7CRXNDR5 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "It was suggested that the workhouses might enter the local industries and markets, on the principle perhaps that such cheap production would have a regulatory effect on the sale price. But the manufactories protested. Daniel Defoe noticed that by the effect of the too easy competition of the workhouses, poverty was created in one area on the pretext of suppressing it in another; “it is giving to one what you take away from another; putting a vagabond in an honest man’s employment, and putting diligence on the tenters to find out some other work to maintain his family.” Faced with this danger of competition, the authorities let the work gradually disappear." (p. 53 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% G4ZDYPF2 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "made to transform the buildings of the Hôpital Général into factories. If we can believe the author of an anonymous mémoire that appeared in 1790, at La Pitié “all the varieties of manufacture that could be offered to the capital” were attempted; finally, “in a kind of despair, a manufacture was undertaken of a sort of lacing found to be the least costly.” Elsewhere, such efforts were scarcely more fruitful. Numerous efforts were made at Bicêtre: manufacture of thread and rope, mirror polishing, and especially the famous “great well.” An attempt was even made, in 1781, to substitute teams of prisoners for the horses that brought up the water, in relay from five in the morning to eight at night: “What reason could have determined this strange occupation? Was it that of economy or simply the necessity of busying the prisoners? If the latter, would it not have been better to occupy them with work more useful both for them and for the hospital? If for reasons of economy, we are a long way from finding any.”5 During the entire eighteenth century, the economic significance Colbert wanted to give the Hôpital Général continued to recede; that center of forced labor would become a place of privileged idleness. “What is the source of the disorders at Bicêtre?” the men of the Revolution were again to ask. And they would supply the answer that had already been given in the seventeenth century: “It is idleness. What is the means of remedying it? Work." (p. 54 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% B6LXSNS2 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "space invented by a society which had derived an ethical transcendence from the law of work, that madness would appear and soon expand until it had annexed them. A day was to come when it could possess these sterile reaches of idleness by a sort of very old and very dim right of inheritance. The nineteenth century would consent, would even insist that to the mad and to them alone be transferred these lands on which, a hundred and fifty years before, men had sought to pen the poor, the vagabond, the unemployed.It is not immaterial that madmen were included in the proscription of idleness. From its origin, they would have their place beside the poor, deserving or not, and the idle, voluntary or not. Like them, they would be subject to the rules of forced labor. More than once, in fact, they figured in their singular fashion within this uniform constraint. In the workshops in which they were interned, they distinguished themselves by their inability to work and to follow the rhythms of collective life. The necessity, discovered in the eighteenth century, to provide a special regime for the insane, and the great crisis of confinement that shortly preceded the Revolution, are linked to the experience of madness available in the universal necessity of labor. Men did not wait until the seventeenth century to “shut up” the mad, but it was in this period that they began to “confine” or “intern” them, along with an entire population with whom their kinship was recognized." (p. 57 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% ANVDCIDU ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Hence the Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral “abeyance” which does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone. The Hôpital Général has an ethical status." (p. 58 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% OC3TNPY2 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "But in this great confinement of the classical age, the essential thing—and the new event—is that men were confined in cities of pure morality, where the law that should reign in all hearts was to be applied without compromise, without concession, in the rigorous forms of physical constraint. Morality permitted itself to be administered like trade or economy." (p. 59 | 18-10-2026) Note: it was a christian work and shut up thing %%end%%

%% 6QZPO63P ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Even late in the eighteenth century, Malesherbes would defend confinement as a right of families seeking to escape dishonor. “That which is called a base action is placed in the rank of those which public order does not permit us to tolerate.… It seems that the honor of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives.”" (p. 64 | 18-10-2026) Note: shame and fear of dishonor long trumped compassion %%end%%

%% 74TLM2DD ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Classicism felt a shame in the presence of the inhuman that the Renaissance had never experienced." (p. 65 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% 3DTHV2XO ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "As late as 1815, if a report presented in the House of Commons is to be believed, the hospital of Bethlehem exhibited lunatics for a penny, every Sunday. Now the annual revenue from these exhibitions amounted to almost four hundred pounds; which suggests the astonishingly high number of 96,000 visits a year.4 In France, the excursion to Bicêtre and the display of the insane remained until the Revolution one of the Sunday distractions for the Left Bank bourgeoisie. Mirabeau reports in his Observations d’un voyageur anglais that the madmen at Bicêtre were shown “like curious animals, to the first simpleton willing to pay a coin.” One went to see the keeper display the madmen the way the trainer at the Fair of Saint-Germain put the monkeys through their tricks.5 Certain attendants were well known for their ability to make the mad perform dances and acrobatics, with a few flicks of the whip. The only extenuation to be found at the end of the eighteenth century was that the mad were allowed to exhibit the mad, as if it were the responsibility of madness to testify to its own nature." (p. 65 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% TD2GWDYE ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Confinement hid away unreason, and betrayed the shame it aroused; but it explicitly drew attention to madness, pointed to it." (p. 66 | 18-10-2026) Note: changes from renaissance to classical period %%end%%

%% 6TUXE27U ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "In his Report on the Care of the Insane Desportes describes the cells of Bicêtre as they were at the end of the eighteenth century: “The unfortunate whose entire furniture consisted of this straw pallet, lying with his head, feet, and body pressed against the wall, could not enjoy sleep without being soaked by the water that trickled from that mass of stone.” As for the cells of La Salpêtrière, what made “the place more miserable and often more fatal, was that in winter, when the waters of the Seine rose, those cells situated at the level of the sewers became not only more unhealthy, but worse still, a refuge for a swarm of huge rats, which during the night attacked the unfortunates confined there and bit them wherever they could reach them; madwomen have been found with feet, hands, and faces torn by bites which are often dangerous and from which several have died.” But these were the dungeons and cells long reserved for the most dangerous and most violent of the insane. If they were calmer, and if no one had anything to fear from them, they were crammed into wards of varying size. One of Samuel Tuke’s most active disciples, Godfrey Higgins, had obtained the right, which cost him twenty pounds, to visit the asylum of York as a volunteer inspector. In the course of a visit, he discovered a door that had been carefully concealed and found behind it a room, not eight feet on a side, which thirteen women occupied during the night; by day, they lived in a room scarcely larger.On the other hand, when the insane were particularly dangerous, they were constrained by a system which was doubtless not of a punitive nature, but simply intended to fix within narrow limits the physical locus of a raging frenzy. Sufferers were generally chained to the walls and to the beds. At Bethlehem, violent madwomen were chained by the ankles to the wall of a long gallery; their only garment was a homespun dress. At another hospital, in Bethnal Green, a woman subject to violent seizures was placed in a pigsty, feet and fists bound; when the crisis had passed she was tied to her bed, covered only by a blanket; when she was allowed to take a few steps, an iron bar was placed between her legs, attached by rings to her ankles and by a short chain to handcuffs. Samuel Tuke, in his Report on the Condition of the Indigent Insane, gives the details of a complicated system devised at Bethlehem to control a reputedly dangerous madman: he was attached by a long chain that ran over the wall and thus permitted the attendant to lead him about, to keep him on a leash, so to speak, from outside; around his neck had been placed an iron ring, which was attached by a short chain to another ring; this latter slid the length of a vertical iron bar fastened to the floor and ceiling of the cell. When reforms began to be instituted at Bethlehem, a man was found who had lived in this cell, attached in this fashion, for twelve years.When practices reach this degree of violent intensity, it becomes clear that they are no longer inspired by the desire to punish nor by the duty to correct. The notion of a “resipiscence” is entirely foreign to this regime. But there was a certain image of animality that haunted the hospitals of the period. Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast. Those chained to the cell walls were no longer men whose minds had wandered, but beasts preyed upon by a natural frenzy: as if madness, at its extreme point, freed from that moral unreason in which its most attenuated forms are enclosed, managed to rejoin, by a paroxysm of strength, the immediate violence of animality. This model of animality prevailed in the asylums and gave them their cagelike aspect, their look of the menagerie. Coguel describes La Salpêtrière at the end of the eighteenth century: “Madwomen seized with fits of violence are chained like dogs at their cell doors, and separated from keepers and visitors alike by a long corridor protected by an iron grille; through this grille is passed their food and the straw on which they sleep; by means of rakes, part of the filth that surrounds them is cleaned out." (p. 67 | 18-10-2026) Note: situation in asylums late 18th century %%end%%

%% O4IHPSRY ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Independently of what Aristotle really meant, may we not assume that for the West this “rational animal” has long been the measure of the way in which reason’s freedom functioned in the locus of unreason, diverging from it until it constituted its opposite term?" (p. 73 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% PW6J35T3 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "In any case, it was this animality of madness which confinement glorified, at the same time that it sought to avoid the scandal inherent in the immorality of the unreasonable." (p. 74 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% XTSIESLB ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "particularly significant?Beginning with the seventeenth century, unreason in the most general sense no longer had much instructive value. That perilous reversibility of reason which was still so close for the Renaissance was to be forgotten, and its scandals were to disappear. The great theme of the madness of the Cross, which belonged so intimately to the Christian experience of the Renaissance, began to disappear in the seventeenth century, despite Jansenism and Pascal. Or rather, it subsisted, but changed and somehow inverted its meaning. It was no longer a matter of requiring human reason to abandon its pride and its certainties in order to lose itself in the great unreason of sacrifice. When classical Christianity speaks of the madness of the Cross, it is merely to humiliate false reason and add luster to the eternal light of truth; the madness of God-in-man’s-image is simply a wisdom not recognized by the men of unreason who live in this world: “Jesus crucified … was the scandal of the world and appeared as nothing but ignorance and madness to the eyes of his time.” But the fact that the world has become Christian, and that the order of God is revealed through the meanderings of history and the madness of men, now suffices to show that “Christ has become the highest point of our wisdom.”9 The scandal of Christian faith and Christian abasement, whose strength and value as revelation Pascal still preserved, would soon have no more meaning for Christian thought except perhaps to reveal in these scandalized consciences so many blind souls: “Do not permit your Cross, which has subdued the universe for you, to be still the madness and scandal of proud minds.” Christian unreason was relegated by Christians themselves into the margins of a reason that had become identical with the wisdom of God incarnate. After Port-Royal, men would have to wait two centuries—until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche—for Christ to regain the glory of his madness, for scandal to recover its power as revelation, for unreason to cease being merely the public shame of reason." (p. 74 | 18-10-2026) Note: christian symbolism and dostoievsky %%end%%

%% 2M7ZTNPG ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "time give it a pretext to humiliate itself, to acknowledge that it is granted only by grace. Further: Christ did not merely choose to be surrounded by lunatics; he himself chose to pass in their eyes for a madman, thus experiencing, in his incarnation, all the sufferings of human misfortune. Madness thus became the ultimate form, the final degree of God in man’s image, before the fulfillment and deliverance of the Cross: “O my Savior, you were pleased to be a scandal to the Jews, and a madness to the Gentiles; you were pleased to seem out of your senses, as it is reported in the Holy Gospel that it was thought of Our Lord that he had gone mad. Dicebant quoniam in furorem versus est. His Apostles sometimes looked upon him as a man in anger, and he seemed such to them, so that they should bear witness that he had borne with all our infirmities and all our states of affliction, and to teach them and us as well to have compassion upon those who fall into these infirmities.”10 Coming into this world, Christ agreed to take upon himself all the signs of the human condition and the very stigmata of fallen nature; from poverty to death, he followed the long road of the Passion, which was also the road of the passions, of wisdom forgotten, and of madness. And because it was one of the forms of the Passion—the ultimate form, in a sense, before death—madness would now become, for those who suffered it, an object of respect and compassion." (p. 75 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% XS3DXZCZ ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "We have now got in the habit of perceiving in madness a fall into a determinism where all forms of liberty are gradually suppressed; madness shows us nothing more than the natural constants of a determinism, with the sequences of its causes, and the discursive movement of its forms; for madness threatens modern man only with that return to the bleak world of beasts and things, to their fettered freedom. It is not on this horizon of nature that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recognized madness, but against a background of Unreason; madness did not disclose a mechanism, but revealed a liberty raging in the monstrous forms of animality. We no longer understand unreason today, except in its epithetic form: the Unreasonable, a sign attached to conduct or speech, and betraying to the layman’s eyes the presence of madness and all its pathological train; for us the unreasonable is only one of madness’s modes of appearance. On the contrary, unreason, for classicism, had a nominal value; it constituted a kind of substantial function. It was in relation to unreason and to it alone that madness could be understood. Unreason was its support; or let us say that unreason defined the locus of madness’s possibility. For classical man, madness was not the natural condition, the human and psychological root of unreason; it was only unreason’s empirical form; and the madman, tracing the course of human degradation to the frenzied nadir of animality, disclosed that underlying realm of unreason which threatens man and envelops—at a tremendous distance—all the forms of his natural existence. It was not a question of tending toward a determinism, but of being swallowed up by a darkness. More effectively than any other kind of rationalism, better in any case than our positivism, classical rationalism could watch out for and guard against the subterranean danger of unreason, that threatening space of an absolute freedom." (p. 78 | 18-10-2026) Note: post about unreson? what is it? %%end%%

%% EXPAWAK2 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The medicine of humors sees this unity primarily as a reciprocal interaction: “The passions necessarily cause certain movements in the humors; anger agitates the bile, sadness excites melancholy (black bile), and the movements of the humors are on occasion so violent that they disrupt the entire economy of the body, even causing death; further, the passions augment the quantity of the humors; anger multiplies the bile as sadness increases melancholy. The humors which are customarily agitated by certain passions dispose those in whom they abound to the same passions, and to thinking of the objects which ordinarily excite them; bile disposes to anger and to thinking of those we hate. Melancholy (black bile) disposes to sadness and to thinking of untoward things; well-tempered blood disposes to joy." (p. 79 | 18-10-2026) Note: even back the , they captured the important and TRUE mechaism of the feedback loop %%end%%

%% XXS6PG6W ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "One more step, and the entire system becomes a unity in which body and soul communicate immediately in the symbolic values of common qualities. This is what happens in the medicine of solids and fluids, which dominates eighteenth-century practice. Tension and release, hardness and softness, rigidity and relaxation, congestion and dryness—these qualitative states characterize the soul as much as the body, and ultimately refer to a kind of indistinct and composite passional situation, one which imposes itself on the concatenation of ideas, on the course of feelings, on the state of fibers, on the circulation of fluids. The theme of causality here appears as too discursive, the elements it groups too disjunct for its schemas to be applicable. Are the “active passions, such as anger, joy, lust,” causes or consequences “of the excessive strength, the excessive tension, and the excessive elasticity of the nervous fibers, and of the excessive activity of the nervous fluid”? Conversely, cannot the “inert passions, such as fear, depression, ennui, lack of appetite, the coldness that accompanies homesickness, bizarre appetites, stupidity, lack of memory” be as readily followed as they are preceded by “weakness of the brain marrow and of the nervous fibers distributed in the organs, by impoverishment and inertia of the fluids”?4 Indeed, we must no longer try to situate passion in a causal succession, or halfway between the corporeal and the spiritual; passion indicates, at a new, deeper level, that the soul and the body are in a perpetual metaphorical relation in which qualities have no need to be communicated because they are already common to both; and in which phenomena of expression are not causes, quite simply because soul and body are always each other’s immediate expression. Passion is no longer exactly at the geometrical center of the body-and-soul complex; it is, a little short of that, at the point where their opposition is not yet given, in that region where both their unity and their distinction are established.But at this level, passion is no longer simply one of the causes—however powerful—of madness; rather it forms the basis for its very possibility. If it is true that there exists a realm, in the relations of soul and body, where cause and effect, determinism and expression still intersect in a web so dense that they actually form only one and the same movement which cannot be dissociated except after the fact; if it is true that prior to the violence of the body and the vivacity of the soul, prior to the softening of the fibers and the relaxation of the mind, there are qualitative, as yet unshared kinds of a priori which subsequently impose the same values on the organic and on the spiritual, then we see that there can be diseases such as madness which are from the start diseases of the body and of the soul, maladies in which the affection of the brain is of the same quality, of the same origin, of the same nature, finally, as the affection of the soul.The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion." (p. 80 | 18-10-2026) Note: passion and madness as seen in the 18th century.passions are "driften", in earlier times they were thought to affect the hunors and lead to a particular configuration of the spirits. Later, they were thought to be at the intersection of body and soul, neither cause and effect, but an expression of both. %%end%%

%% 36MU5CZL ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "it saw that the determinism of the passions was nothing but a chance for madness to penetrate the world of reason; and that if the unquestioned union of body and soul manifested man’s finitude in passion, it laid this same man open, at the same time, to the infinite movement that destroyed him." (p. 81 | 18-10-2026) Note: passion is iets als vices of driften. de antithese van reason, de gedetermineerd is, en waaaar dus niet tegen geredeneerd kan worden: unreason.perhaps they saw in it a suprem unishment, the ultimate sinalso, madness as the far end of the vices spectrum, het is je eigen schuld jij zondaar. Dat terwijl het in de middeleeuwen heel normaal was en nou eenmaa bij het leven horde, want jezus had het immers zelf ook gehadaddendum: madness is niet alleen een zonde en een waarschuwing m je te gedragen, het is ook een mogelijkheid vooor unreason een plekje te bemachtigen, en dat willen de rationele science boys niet %%end%%

%% NGKW4EGY ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Madness, which finds its first possibility in the phenomenon of passion, and in the deployment of that double causality which, starting from passion itself, radiates both toward the body and toward the soul, is at the same time suspension of passion, breach of causality, dissolution of the elements of this unity. Madness participates both in the necessity of passion and in the anarchy of what, released by this very passion, transcends it and ultimately contests all it implies. Madness ends by being a movement of the nerves and muscles so violent that nothing in the course of images, ideas, or wills seems to correspond to it: this is the case of mania when it is suddenly intensified into convulsions, or when it degenerates into continuous frenzy. Conversely, madness can, in the body’s repose or inertia, generate and then maintain an agitation of the soul, without pause or pacification, as is the case in melancholia, where external objects do not produce the same impression on the sufferer’s mind as on that of a healthy man; “his impressions are weak and he rarely pays attention to them; his mind is almost totally absorbed by the vivacity of certain ideas.”" (p. 83 | 18-10-2026) Note: madness as excess passion, specifically mani and sth simjlr to psychotic depression.beautifully put explanation of how madness is beyond the passion that caused it %%end%%

%% GCV4AGSM ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "the soul is not excluded from the body, but is swept along so rapidly by it that it cannot retain all its conceptions; it is separated from its memories, its intentions, its firmest ideas, and thus isolated from itself and from all that remains stable in the body, it surrenders itself to the most mobile fibers; nothing in its behavior is henceforth adapted to reality, to truth, or to prudence; though the fibers in their vibration may imitate what is happening in the perceptions, the sufferer cannot tell the difference: “The rapid and chaotic pulsations of the arteries, or whatever other derangement occurs, imprints this same movement on the fibers (as in perception); they will represent as present objects which are not so, as true those which are chimerical." (p. 84 | 18-10-2026) Note: thw loss of reality described beautifully %%end%%

%% WQ7YPEBO ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "“Madness is no more than the derangement of the imagination.”8 In other words, beginning with passion, madness is still only an intense movement in the rational unity of soul and body; this is the level of unreason; but this intense movement quickly escapes the reason of the mechanism and becomes, in its violences, its stupors, its senseless propagations, an irrational movement; and it is then that, escaping truth and its constraints, the Unreal appears." (p. 84 | 18-10-2026) Note: A tier quote on madness %%end%%

%% U63FJEAT ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Madness is thus beyond imagination, and yet it is profoundly rooted in it; for it consists merely in allowing the image a spontaneous value, total and absolute truth. The act of the reasonable man who, rightly or wrongly, judges an image to be true or false, is beyond this image, transcends and measures it by what is not itself; the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to its immediacy, and affirms it only insofar is it is enveloped by it: “Many persons, not to say all, succumb to madness only from being too concerned about an object.”11 Inside the image, confiscated by it, and incapable of escaping from it, madness is nonetheless more than imagination, forming an act of undetermined content." (p. 85 | 18-10-2026) Note: madness and imagination %%end%%

%% UGFXF2VA ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Imagination is not madness. Even if in the arbitrariness of hallucination, alienation finds the first access to its vain liberty, madness begins only beyond this point, when the mind binds itself to this arbitrariness and becomes a prisoner of this apparent liberty. At the moment he wakes from a dream, a man can indeed observe: “I am imagining that I am dead”: he thereby denounces and measures the arbitrariness of the imagination—he is not mad. He is mad when he posits as an affirmation of his death—when he suggests as having some value as truth—the still-neutral content of the image “I am dead." (p. 85 | 18-10-2026) Note: key term here is alienation, which allows the image to become truth %%end%%

%% ZIU6DYWT ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Let us consider an example borrowed from Diemerbroek. A man was suffering from a profound melancholia. As with all melancholics, his mind was attached to a fixed idea, and this idea was for him the occasion of a constantly renewed sadness. He accused himself of having killed his son, and in the excess of his remorse, declared that God, for his punishment, had assigned a demon to tempt him, like the demon which had tempted the Lord. This demon he saw, spoke to, heard, and answered. He did not understand why those around him refused to acknowledge such a presence. Such then is madness: this remorse, this belief, this hallucination, these speeches; in short, this complex of convictions and images which constitutes a delirium. Now Diemerbroek tries to find out what are the “causes” of this madness, how it can have originated. And this is what he learns: this man had taken his son bathing and the boy had drowned. Hence the father considered himself responsible for his son’s death. We can therefore reconstitute in the following manner the development of this madness: judging himself guilty, the man decides that homicide is execrable in the sight of God on High; whence it occurs to his imagination that he is eternally damned; and since he knows that the chief torment of damnation consists in being delivered into Satan’s hands, he tells himself “that a horrible demon is assigned to him.” This demon he does not as yet see, but since “he does not cease thinking of it,” and “regards this notion as necessarily true,” he imposes on his brain a certain image of this demon; this image is presented to his soul by the action of the brain and of the spirits with such insistence that he believes he continually sees the demon itself.”" (p. 86 | 18-10-2026) Note: a 1685 case report showing we haent gotten much further at all, by ysbrad van riemerbroek frm utrecht %%end%%

%% 6VWZOVFC ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The man who imagines he is made of glass is not mad, for any sleeper can have this image in a dream; but he is mad if, believing he is made of glass, he thereby concludes that he is fragile, that he is in danger of breaking, that he must touch no object which might be too resistant, that he must in fact remain motionless, and so on. Such reasonings are those of a madman; but again we must note that in themselves they are neither absurd nor illogical. On the contrary, they apply correctly the most rigorous figures of logic. And Paul Zacchias has no difficulty finding them, in all their rigor, among the insane. Syllogism, in a man letting himself starve to death: “The dead do not eat; I am dead; hence I do not eat.” Induction extended to infinity, in a man suffering from persecution delusions: “A, B, and C are my enemies; all of them are men; therefore all men are my enemies.” Enthymeme, in another sufferer: “Most of those who have lived in this house are dead, hence I, who have lived in this house, am dead.” The marvelous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language. “From these things,” Zacchias concludes, “you truly see how best to discuss the intellect.” The ultimate language of madness is that of reason, but the language of reason enveloped in the prestige of the image, limited to the locus of appearance which the image defines. It forms, outside the totality of images and the universality of discourse, an abusive, singular organization whose insistent quality constitutes madness. Madness, then, is not altogether in the image, which of itself is neither true nor false, neither reasonable nor mad; nor is it, further, in the reasoning which is mere form, revealing nothing but the indubitable figures of logic. And yet madness is in one and in the other: in a special version or figure of their relationship." (p. 86 | 18-10-2026) Note: madness and logicmadness is not as far from wisdom as you might expect. couple this with the elderly lady who drove to germany to protect ppl frm the virus she thought she was spreading %%end%%

%% 2OQGBK4R ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "horrible demon is assigned to him.” This demon he does not as yet see, but since “he does not cease thinking of it,” and “regards this notion as necessarily true,” he imposes on his brain a certain image of this demon; this image is presented to his soul by the action of the brain and of the spirits with such insistence that he believes he continually sees the demon itself.”12Hence madness, as analyzed by Diemerbroek, has two levels; one is manifest to all eyes: an unwarranted melancholia in a man who wrongly accuses himself of having killed his son; a depraved imagination which pictures demons; a dismantled reason which converses with a phantom. But 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. And this in a double sense, since we find here both what makes madness true (irrefutable logic, perfectly organized discourse, faultless connection in the transparency of a virtual language) and what makes it truly madness (its own nature, the special style of all its manifestations, and the internal structure of delirium)." (p. 87 | 18-10-2026) Note: even back rhen they knew there was reason behind madness %%end%%

%% JWB2SSJV ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "But still more profoundly, this delirious language is the ultimate truth of madness insofar as it is madness’s organizing form, the determining principle of all its manifestations, whether of the body or of the soul. For if Diemerbroek’s melancholic converses with his demon, it is because the demon’s image has been profoundly impressed by the movement of spirits on the still-ductile substance of the brain. But in its turn, this organic figure is merely the other side of a preoccupation which has obsessed the patient’s mind; it represents what might be called the sedimentation in the body of an infinitely repeated discourse apropos of the punishment God must reserve for sinners guilty of homicide." (p. 88 | 18-10-2026) Note: similar to tht norwegian perspective open dialogue method as well as older psychodynamic approaches that place delusions in the contwxt of repressed fears and grievances of past experience %%end%%

%% 4F5VSRCP ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "And lest we be criticized for elaborating this entire analysis around a single observation from a single author (a privileged observation, since it concerns melancholic delirium), we shall also seek confirmation of the fundamental role of delirious discourse in the classical conception of madness in another author, of another period, and apropos of a very different disease. This is a case of “nymphomania” observed by Bienville." (p. 88 | 18-10-2026) Note: the thought that deusionl thought contet is somwhow random is absurd. how can it be otherwise? for one, determinism dictates it must come from somewhere. secondly, the fact that delusional thought content changes with thw tims suggests it is influenced by peoples experiene . why then could it not represent repressed fears? %%end%%

%% ACVILPEV ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The simplest and most general definition we can give of classical madness is indeed delirium: “This word is derived from lira, a furrow; so that deliro actually means to move out of the furrow, away from the proper path of reason.”15 Hence it is not surprising to find the eighteenth-century nosographers often classifying vertigo as a madness, and more rarely hysterical convulsions; this is because it is often impossible to find in hysterical convulsions the unity of a language, while vertigo affords the delirious affirmation that the world is really “turning around.” Such delirium is a necessary and sufficient reason for a disease to be called madness.4. Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature. That the essence of madness can be ultimately defined in the simple structure of a discourse does not reduce it to a purely psychological nature, but gives it a hold over the totality of soul and body; such discourse is both the silent language by which the mind speaks to itself in the truth proper to it, and the visible articulation in the movements of the body. Parallelisms, complements, all the forms of immediate communication which we have seen manifested, in madness are suspended between soul and body in this single language and in its powers. The movement of passion which persists until it breaks and turns against itself, the sudden appearance of the image, and the agitations of the body which were its visible concomitants—all this, even as we were trying to reconstruct it, was already secretly animated by this language. If the determinism of passion is transcended and released in the hallucination of the image, if the image, in return, has swept away the whole world of beliefs and desires, it is because the delirious language was already present—a discourse which liberated passion from all its limits, and adhered with all the constraining weight of its affirmation to the image which was liberating itself." (p. 90 | 18-10-2026) Note: some kind of proto language used by the subconscious is wat i think he refers to. related: minimising reconstruction error in autoencoders. %%end%%

%% SEUNBMDA ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Whereas tradition compared the delirium of the madman to the vivacity of the dream images, the classical period identified delirium only with the complex of the image and the night of the mind, against which background it assumed its liberty. And this complex, transposed entire into the clarity of the waking state, constituted madness. This is how we must understand the definitions of madness which insistently recur throughout the classical period. The dream, as a complex figure of image and sleep, is almost always present in that definition." (p. 92 | 18-10-2026) Note: just like in drems, madness has an absenxe of fact checking a asence of pre existing conviction, a backdrop against which the image/the delirium may develop freely, unconstrained by th mecaisms of rwason present during the day. when dreaming, there is no part of the dreamer wondering about the truthiness of the dream %%end%%

%% 7QJTHALY ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "The important thing, in Zacchias’s analysis, is that madness is not associated with dreams in their positive phenomena, but rather to the totality formed by sleep and dreams together: that is, to a complex which includes—besides the image—hallucination, memory, or prediction, the great void of sleep, the night of the senses, and all that negativity which wrests man from the waking state and its apparent truths." (p. 92 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% ZV2M35XT ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "an illusion, of a hallucination of his senses, or of a movement of his mind. He is not abused; he deceives himself. If it is true that on one hand the madman’s mind is led on by the oneiric arbitrariness of images, on the other, and at the same time, he imprisons himself in the circle of an erroneous consciousness: “We call madmen,” Sauvages was to say, “those who are actually deprived of reason or who persist in some notable error; it is this constant error of the soul manifest in its imagination, in its judgments, and in its desires, which constitutes the characteristic of this category.”Madness begins where the relation of man to truth is disturbed and darkened. It is in this relation, at the same time as in the destruction of this relation, that madness assumes its general meaning and its particular forms. Dementia, Zacchias says, using the term here in the most general sense of madness, “lay in this, that the intellect did not distinguish true from false.” But this breakdown, if we can understand it only as negation, has positive structures which give it singular forms. According to the different forms of access to the truth, there will be different types of madness. It is in this sense that Chrichton, for example, distinguishes in the order of vesanias, first the class deliria, which alter that relation to the truth which takes shape in perception (“general delirium of the mental faculties, in which the diseased perceptions are taken for realities”); then the class hallucinations, which alter representation (“error of the mind in which imaginary objects are taken for realities, or else real objects are falsely represented”); and last, the class dementias, which without abolishing or altering the faculties that afford access to truth, weaken them and diminish their powers." (p. 93 | 18-10-2026) Note: madneas is the absence of truth bc of 3 possible things: delirium ie wrong interpretations, hallucination, and dementia ie diminished mental faculties.moreover, he argues classical thoughtt rendered madness a form of ERROR, ie morl error or fault. %%end%%

%% QYVED46P ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Either in a negative fashion—the notion of the waking state then being the only one that distinguishes madmen from sleepers; or in a positive fashion, delirium being defined as a modality of the dream, with the waking state as the specific difference: “Delirium is the dream of waking persons.”17 The ancients’ notion of the dream as a transitory form of madness is inverted; it is no longer the dream which borrows its disturbing powers from alienation—showing thereby how fragile or limited reason is; it is madness which takes its original nature from the dream and reveals in this kinship that it is a liberation of the image in the dark night of reality." (p. 93 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%

%% S7IJN2SH ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Madness is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous; it traverses, in its variations, the surface on which they meet, the surface which both joins and separates them. With error, madness shares non-truth, and arbitrariness in affirmation or negation; from the dream, madness borrows the flow of images and the colorful presence of hallucinations. But while error is merely non-truth, while the dream neither affirms nor judges, madness fills the void of error with images, and links hallucinations by affirmation of the false." (p. 95 | 18-10-2026) Note: dreamlike and faultlike %%end%%

%% 7E67ZYTY ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "Dazzlement" (p. 96 | 18-10-2026) Note: (n.) Dazzling flash, glare, or burst of light. %%end%%

%% HNLW2AW5 ts: 2026-10-18T09:52:49Z %% "What we now know of unreason affords us a better understanding of what confinement was.This gesture, which banished madness to a neutral and uniform world of exclusion, did not mark a halt in the evolution of medical techniques, nor in the progress of humanitarian ideas. It assumed its precise meaning in this fact: that madness in the classical period ceased to be the sign of another world, and that it became the paradoxical manifestation of non-being. Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing. That is, on one hand madness is immediately perceived as difference: whence the forms of spontaneous and collective judgment sought, not from physicians, but from men of good sense, to determine the confinement of a madman; and on the other hand, confinement cannot have any other goal than a correction (that is, the suppression of the difference, or the fulfillment of this nothingness in death); whence those options for death so often to be found in the registers of confinement, written by the attendants, and which are not the sign of confinement’s savagery, its inhumanity or perversion, but the strict expression of its meaning: an operation to annihilate nothingness.20 Confinement sketches, on the surface of phenomena and in a hasty moral synthesis, the secret and distinct structure of madness." (p. 101 | 18-10-2026) %%end%%