Ebook: The History of Reason in the Age of Madness: Foucault’s Enlightenment and a Radical Critique of Psychiatry

Michel Foucault is regarded by many as a postmodern anti-psychiatrist, an anti-Enlightenment theorist whose lifelong preoccupation with power, knowledge and discourse is viewed as antithetical to psychiatric reason and truth. The present study offers a critique of this reading of Foucault, demonstrating how his theoretical approach does not oppose either the Enlightenment or psychiatry tout court but rather illustrates that what mental health professionals have inherited from the Enlightenment is not its forms of rationality, but the anthropological confrontation of reason with the irrational, the inhuman. In Foucault’s line of thought, this anthropological critique does not seek to expand, refine or refute the domain of psychiatric knowledge, but to locate its limitations and to trace its weak points where the foundation of psychiatric rationality can appear most vulnerable so that it may be overturned. This is not to imply an irrationalist method of approach but, on the contrary, a sceptical stance where psychiatric rationality questions its own sovereignty and its claims to universality. Following and systematizing Foucault’s method through an extensive discussion of his influences and his main interlocutors (Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Virilio, Žižek) the aim of the present study is not to present a general rational theory which will supposedly ‘enlighten’ psychiatrists, but to place the mental health worker in a position to challenge not only the psychiatric institution but more generally the rational framework of the society in which he functions. Through the anthropological worldview, the psychiatrist can become a diagnostician of his present reality inside and beyond the psychiatric institution.