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More Radical Hermeneutics

On Not Knowing Who We Are

Indiana University Press

On Not Knowing Who We Are

Madness, Hermeneutics, and the Night of Truth in Foucault

In this essay, which I take as the point of departure for the present study, from which indeed the whole has drawn its name, I argue that Michel Foucault's thought is best construed as a hermeneutics of not knowing who we are. I construe Foucault's work to operate according to what Jacques Derrida calls the logic of the sans. That means that we get the best results by proceeding sans voir, sans avoir, sans savoir, without sight, without savvy, and without seizing hold of what we love. This is a bit of a perversity, turning as it does, not on uncovering the truth or illuminating us, which is the standard hope philosophers hold out to us, but on living with the untruth, with what early on Foucault calls the "night of truth." The night of truth is the truth that there is no capitalized Truth, no "truth of truth." In the spirit of a certain Saint Augustine, I read Foucault as if he were engaged in a confessional practice, making a confession in writing, confiteri in letteris, that from the start, as Derrida says, the secret is there is no Secret. For there is no way around the beliefs and practices in which we are steeped, by which we are shaped from time out of mind. I see Foucault's work as very circum-fessional, confessing that we are all circumcised, cut off from the heart of unconcealed truth, but this without nostalgia, without concluding — as Richard Rorty attributes to him — that we are thereby lost and have no grounds for hope at all.

So contrary to the received view of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, according to whom Foucault's thought moves "beyond hermeneutics," I would rather say it moves beyond a certain "tragic" hermeneutics toward a more radical one, toward what I will call here a "hermeneutics of refusal." Foucault as I see him rejects a hermeneutics of "identity" in favor of a hermeneutics of "difference," negates an assured and positive hermeneutics in order to affirm joyously and positively a hermeneutica negativa. I will take my point of departure from Foucault's early writings on madness, although I am also clearly interested in confessions, and so in what he says later on about Christian "confessional techniques." At the end I will attempt to push out beyond Foucault, to a Foucault without Foucault, in keeping with this logic of the sans, by addressing the question of what I will call the "healing gestures" that should accompany all confession. Those who, like us, confess the humility of our condition should not be left to shiver through the night of truth all alone. I push forward in a direction that, while Foucault did not take it, is perhaps suggested by him, is one of the potencies of his thought, belonging to the wake of his passing ship, in which we push past a hermeneutics of refusal to one of response and redress.

Tragic Hermeneutics: Madness and the Night of Truth

In his earliest writings on "mental illness" (maladie), Foucault drew a fascinating portrait of déraison — "unreason," the failing or giving way of reason — "before" it was interned and reduced to silence. By the nineteenth century, unreason had been constituted as "mental illness," an object for the "psychology of madness" (folie), which overwhelmed madness simultaneously with the external force of internment and the internal force of moralizing. The effect of this psychology was to foreshorten "the experience of Unreason," an experience in which, Foucault says, "[w]estern man encountered the night of his truth and its absolute challenge," which once was and still is "the mode of access to the natural truth of man."

What Foucault had in mind at that time might be described as a "destruction of the history of psychology" that parallels Martin Heidegger's project of a "destruction of the history of ontology" in §6 of Being and Time. Were psychology to reflect on itself, it would effect a kind of Destruktion that would constitute at the same time a retrieval of a more essential truth. It would suffer a kind of auto-deconstruction, coming under the scrutiny of its own eye. That is because psychology is the alienated truth of madness, the truth in a "derisory" or alienated form that precisely on that account harbors within itself and maintains contacts with something "essential." While deriding madness under the hypocritical veil of moralizing internment, psychology "cannot fail to move toward the essential," toward that originary point from which it itself arises as a science, namely, "those regions in which man has a relation with himself."

If carried back to its roots, the psychology of madness would appear to be ... the destruction of psychology itself and the discovery of that essential, non-psychological because non-moralizable relation that is the relation between Reason and Unreason. (MIP, 74)

Beneath its moralization by the humanist reformers — viewing madness as somehow a moral failing, an effect of ill will — lies its more essential truth. Psychology cannot master the truth of madness because the truth of madness is the soil from which psychology springs, the prior, anterior sphere of unconcealment of which it is itself the alienating, scientific derivative. Madness is the founding experience from which psychology derives, from the distortion of which it itself arises. Occasionally, Foucault points out, the founding, originary experiences of madness do find a voice — in such artists as Friedrich Hölderlin, Gerard de Nerval, Raymond Roussel, and Antonin Artaud — and "that holds out the promise to man that one day, perhaps, he will be able to be free of all psychology and be ready for the great tragic confrontation with madness" (MIP, 75). Lying prior to the scientific truth of psychology, the poetic experience of the truth of madness represents a more radical unconcealment of madness.

"Mental illness" is "alienated madness," madness in an alienated form. The aim of Foucault's work at this point is to bring us "face to face" with madness in its unalienated truth, to let it speak in its own voice, which is not the voice of reason or science, to regain "madness freed and disalienated, restored in some sense to its original language" (MIP, 76). But what can this original experience be? What would unreason say were its voice restored? What is the truth of madness, the truth that madness knows but we have silenced? Madness is "difference," extreme, disturbing difference, inhabiting a "void." The Renaissance took the "risk" of exposing itself to this void. It let itself be put into question by madness, without shutting madness away. It allowed itself to be invaded by the "Other," the "insane." It allowed the familiar, the heimlich, to be invaded by the strange and unheimlich. It allowed reason to be tested by unreason: "it thought itself wise and it was mad; it thought it knew and it knew nothing" (MIP, 77). But in the seventeenth century there began what Foucault describes as "the negative appraisal of what had been originally apprehended as the Different, the Insane, Unreason" (MIP, 78).

So we have in the last two hundred years constituted homo psychologicus, the object of psychological science. Psychological man is a substitute that puts in the place of man's "relation to the truth" (MIP, 87) the assumption that psychological man is himself "the truth of the truth." By this Foucault means that the "real" — let us say "cold" — truth of our divided condition is explained away and forgotten by the "truth" of psychological science and its purportedly scientific explanations of an inner mental pathology. But the truth of truth, the truth of psychology arrives too late, only after madness in its truth has been closed off. Indeed, psychology itself is constituted as a science only on the basis of having closed off madness and turned it into a phantom of itself. Psychological truth is a way of forgetting the truth and reducing it to silence. Foucault refers to this truth that psychology allows us to forget, and that can be recognized in the modern world only in "lightning flashes" with names like "Friedrich Nietzsche," as a "tragic split" and "freedom" (MIP, 88).

Foucault thus pursues in these early writings an original approach to madness. He is not interested in its "physiological" basis, which he does not deny, or in its "cure," which he does not "oppose" (MIP, 86), but in the "truth of madness," in what the mad — shall we say — "know" or "experience." He is not addressing its physiology or its therapeutics but its "hermeneutics" and the way in which psychological science conceals, represses, forgets, and silences the truth of madness (rather the way that Hans-Georg Gadamer thinks that "method" objectifies and alienates "truth"). In these early writings the mad "know" something that we want first to diagnose and then to treat (and in recent years simply to anaesthetize with powerful psychotherapeutic drugs), whereas Foucault wants to linger with it for a while, to listen and to learn from it, to hear what it has to say.

What do the mad know? What truth would they speak if we lend them an ear? A "tragic" truth, the truth of a "split," let us say, a tragic knowledge. This is the sort of truth that would kill you — or drive you mad — of which Nietzsche spoke. Was Nietzsche's madness a function of what he knew? Was his knowledge a function of his madness? Foucault suspends both alternatives because they are causal, etiological; he subjects both questions to a kind of epoche that puts physiological and therapeutic questions out of action. His interest is hermeneutic: he wants to hear what one says who has been driven in extremis. While Foucault does not cite it here, one is reminded of the passage in Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche repudiates the need to have the truth "attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified" — which is pretty much what Foucault thinks happens to madness in psychology. Foucault seems to have in mind what Nietzsche calls the "elect of knowledge," who are almost destroyed by their knowledge, which carries them off into "distant, terrible worlds."

The mad, in these early writings, have experienced a terrible truth; they sail on dangerous seas, have been released from ordinary constraints; they are extreme points of sensitivity to the human condition. They are not truly "other" than "us." That is only the alienating gesture in which "we" constitute ourselves as sane and normal and constitute "them" as "other." The mad speak of a truth to us for which we have neither the nerve nor the ear, which is the truth of who we are. They instruct us about our hostility, meanness, aggressiveness, combativeness (MIP, 80–81). "Man has become for man the face of his own truth as well as the possibility of his death" (MIP, 82).

Foucault is not saying that the mad are the true philosophers but rather that they are precisely not philosophers at all, that they are the most forceful testimony to the breakdown of philosophy. They speak not with philosophical knowledge but with tragic knowledge. They have broken through the veil that philosophy lays over reality and that, in the form of psychology, philosophy tries to lay over them. The mad speak de profundis, from the depths of an experience in which both the reassuring structures of ordinary life and the comforting reassurances of scientific or philosophical knowledge have collapsed. They experience the radical groundlessness of the world, the contingency of its constructs, both social and epistemic; they speak of and from a kind of ineradicable terror. They speak to us from the abyss by which we are all inhabited; they are voices from an abyss.

This discussion, which Foucault inserted as the new part 2 of the 1962 revised edition of Maladie mentale et Psychologie, is an incisive summary of Madness and Civilization published a year before, whose "Preface" and "Conclusion" it closely parallels. Madness and Civilization opens with a reference to the madness of not being mad, the dangerous and unhealthy (in-sanum) condition of failing to recognize that "we" too are a little mad, invaded also by unreason, and that it is mad to want to make reason a wholly insulated and pure region, a seamless sphere of the same insulated from its other. He speaks of the madness of sovereign reason, the madness of a reason that thinks it has purified itself of the madness that inhabits us all, whose exclusion constitutes us as "us," the madness that speaks in a "merciless" language of madlessness. The goal of Madness and Civilization is to arrive at a zero point, a point before madness is divided off from reason, before the lines of communication between the two are cut, before reason looks sovereignly — that is, without risk or threat — upon madness as its pure Other. This is a region in which "truth" and "science" do not obtain, which is prior to and older than science, which is older than the merciless "difference" between reason and madness, a region of an originary undifferentiatedness in which reason mingles with and is disturbed from within by its other. Such a return to the original scene of madness will isolate "the action that divides madness," the "originative ... caesura" by means of which reason and science are made to stand on the side, or better to look on from above, while unreason spreads out beneath its gaze as its object" (MC, ix). Then unreason is constituted as madness, crime, or mental disease. That deprives madness of its voice — reduces it, in Jean-François Lyotard's words, to a différend in which it is impossible for madness to state its case — and establishes the monologue of reason with itself that we call psychology and psychiatry.

The Greeks, by way of contrast, thought of sophrosyne and hybris as alternate possibilities — of moderation and excess — within logos, but they did not constitute some sphere of exile, of a-logos, outside logos (MC, ix). The discourse on madness Europeans conducted beginning in the Middle Ages gives a "depth" to Western reason that irrupts in some of its greatest artists and poets (Hieronymous Bosch, Nietzsche, Artaud) (MC, xi). Reason without unreason is a smooth surface, a superficial transparency; reason with unreason speaks from the depths, de profundis. Unreason reduced to its scientific "truth," constituted as a scientific object, is a surface event, a thin, transparent, placid object. If that depth is still apparent in the "dispute" conducted between reason and madness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the depth is gone and the dispute is hushed in the silent corridors of the mental institution. The task of Madness and Civilization thus is one of archeological restoration, a vertical plumbing of the dark sedimented depths from which homo psychologicus emerges, of which it still bears a faint trace, reminding us of these hidden depths even as it tries to make us forget them.

What is the "great motionless structure" (MC, xii) lying beneath the surface that is reducible neither to the drama of a dispute nor to an object of knowledge? Foucault's answer is again the tragic ("the tragic category"). By the tragic he means a radical breach or split within human being, a profound rupture that makes it impossible for reason to constitute itself as an identity, to close round about itself, to make itself reason and light through and through. Reason is always already unreason; the truth of man is this untruth. The attempt to find the "truth of truth" is the attempt to expunge this untruth, to take leave of a more disturbing and disturbed region, to simplify and reduce human beings to pure reason by constituting the twin transparencies of reason on the one side and madness as the object of knowledge on the other.

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Excerpted from More Radical Hermeneutics by John D. Caputo. Copyright © 2000 John D. Caputo. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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