Often one reads that Foucault romanticized insanity, and
this is why he pisses people off. I don't believe that.
I believe he pisses people off because he refuses to
romanticize sanity. He refuses the unspoken agreement, among men of good will,
that we are all sane here. He refuses to see the dreadful networks of death and
destruction, the dreadful vacuous boredom that consists of fear of boredom on
the one side and the prisons on the other, as collectively sane, and you just
don't make those noises in the club. The biggest and most consistent
romanticizers are, after all, those who find the position they live in, all the
amenities, the distant violence and the vicarious pleasures, the whole goddamn
ball of wax, as something completely normal. What a crock that is. Foucault had
an unrelenting grip on that thing.
Madness is, on the one hand, a very plain thing - I go into
the library, some poor bugeyed soul approaches me to tell me what he's been
hearing, and I say to myself: you are mad.
On the other hand, all of it is also at large, out there
among the suits, as the sanest behavior. The Greeks with their slaves and their
incredible tortures and deaths. The whole early modern period, where the sane
got jobs as, say, slave traders. In Saint Domingue, in the eighteenth century,
a slave could be punished for having eaten some sugarcane by being forced to
work with a metal cage fastened to his head - an ingenious torture for a hot
climate, among bugs. Now, a sane craftsman made the cage, a sane overseer puts
it on the man's head, a sane plantation manager made the rules, a sane owner
gets the money. I believe they were sane. But what good was all that sanity?
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