Re: philosophy as intoxication

On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Tom Maria Blancato wrote:

> Perhaps the cooption of "madness" in these discourses will one day be
> looked upon with some embarassment. Simply to posit "madness" as "reason's
> other", or to imagine that taking drugs can faithfull or even adequately
> "replicate" what is called "mad" requires of the philosopher, or
> thinkiner, that he or she rupture his or her own epistemology, quality of
> thought (not to be equated with "rationality"), etc., since it seems prima
> facie clear that what is known as "madness" often takes forms which are
> marked by torment of such an extreme nature that it could not possibly be
> easily equated with the rough and ready, or down and dirty, sense
> appropriated in "postmodern" thought.
>     In their war with Freud, rationality, totalism and hegemony, etc.,
> these people appear to throw the baby of personal history, living
> conditions, conditions of experience, social history, and a whole host
> of areas and issues, out with the bathwater of "mummy-daddy-me" and the 
> "oh, so that's what it meant all along." 

> TMB

  Yes, Tom, these are my sentiments exactly.....Though I'm not sure to
what degree and in what sense Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze (to name
three) may THINK they are "rupturing their own epistemology," as against
only (their own) language or "sense." In fact, this very issue of reason/ 
unreason and the "rupture of epistemology," or of the cogito, is at
stake in Foucault's "Histoire de la Folie" & Derrida's critique (in
"Cogito and the History of Madness" in "Writing and Difference") of F's
position on Descartes' discourse on madness ("I know I'm sitting here now
by this fire, only a madman could doubt it, think it was an hallucination,
and I KNOW I'M NOT MAD.....BUT a man at night might also dream it, and how
do I know I'm not dreaming now?"). Foucault in "Histoire" reads this as a
philosophical "excluding of madness" (from the cogito, from human
rationality); Derrida claims (against F's assertion that Descartes
is "including" dreams but not madness) that for Descartes the
dreamer is even "madder than the madman," but that the crucial
issue is neither "ordinary" (conscious/unconscious) dreams nor
madness but the more radically open possibility of a metaphysical
or "HYPERBOLIC ('throwing beyond') INVERSION," if God is truly a
malin genie who deceives us both as to our own existence and as to
logical "truths" like "A = A".....Foucault in a response to Derrida
("Descartes' 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire'") DOES actually come back to
a "PRAGMATIC" argument about how Descartes' "including" madness (within
his own cogito/reason) would have been a true "epistemological rupture" or
"discontinuity" and thus impossible....(I think.....).....

   Here one might think Derrida's "hyperbolism"--"The certainty of the
cogito is not attained by the imprisonment of madness, rather it is
accomplished 'within madness itself'....The cogito, even if deceived about
everything, precisely in this gesture exceeds everything"--is fascinating,
and yet we also know Derrida's "encompassing madness" here, moving "in the
direction of infinity or nothingness," is somehow still a "tame" madness,
one that still somehow lies withing the all-encompassing rationality of
language and philosophical theorizing....(don't we?....)....
   
   We might then think Foucault is closer to the "real" madness.....also
(and especially) Deleuze, though in another way, with all his very
empirical, very "material" descriptions of madness.....We might also see
Deleuze's proximity to the irrational and/or mad (are they different?) in
terms of his poetic/rhizomic language in "Milles Plateaux," and/or the
molecular-chaosmotic, all-inclusive "contents".....And yet your
point--that these post-modern theorists hardly themselves FEEL, deal with
or express the real pain of madness or irrationality (except of course 
maybe Deleuze in his last days?) but rather only intellectualize, theorize
and poetize it--is still valid....(I think....)
   
   fws