ABSTRACT
In his early essays Foucault privileges a grouping of ‘mad philosophers’ whose transgressive explorations of language appeared to constitute a counter-tradition against the optimism of the Enlightenment and its human sciences (Bouchard, 1977 pp. 18-19). In Madness and Civilisation (Foucault, 1961/1971), Nietzsche and Artaud are exalted to the point where they seem to function as ‘tutelary deities’ in his pantheon (Macey, 1993 p. 103). We might reasonably expect such fascination to be grounded in some compelling commonality of biographical experience, but at first sight Foucault’s ‘lives’ look somewhat different from those of his favoured predecessors. Although Foucault came from a relatively privileged class background, and gained entry to the exclusive Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), he also encountered the realities of oppression as a gay man. Largely because of this, it seems, he endured a period of suicidal distress, during which, we now know, he repeatedly self-harmed.1 Unlike Nietzsche and Artaud who both descended into madness later in life and for whom public recognition was largely ‘posthumous’, Foucault recovered and went on to pursue a distinguished career, first in cultural centres run by the diplomatic service, and then in academia. For much of his life, therefore, he had to negotiate simultaneous social inclusion and insidious marginalisation, and it was this contradictory positioning that fuelled and informed his hugely influential philosophical investigations into the operations of power.
