ABSTRACT
I have argued for the relevance of a critical postmodern theoretical framework that challenges the ascendancy of masculinist Enlightenment rationality while giving due weight to voices historically excluded from the public realm, and have opened up a discussion about masculinity and madness in the context of four biographical studies that suggests a relationship between the momentum towards unbounded deconstruction and
the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity. I now want to consider the application of postmodern thought to current debates in the field. For all its inclusive rhetoric and apparent celebration of diversity, mainstream postmodern social theory has been charged with appropriating understandings wrought from the myriad experiences of women and of people from non-Western cultures, and because of its questioning of assumptions about authenticity and the possibility of coherent subjecthood, of undermining the very basis upon which assertions of difference appear to depend. Critics argue that a postmodern ‘we’ has been constituted through acts of exclusion and othering, and ‘the Other’ vaunted, ironically, in order to demonstrate the ultimate meaninglessness of any identity it might contain. ‘We are all Others now’ (Sardar, 1998 p. 13; Ahmed, 1998 p. 6). On this basis it might be claimed that pivotal to postmodern announcements of the death of a generalised, implicitly masculine subject has been another pattern of appropriation, that of the imagery and experience of madness. In previous chapters I traced the genealogy of this appropriation back to an anguished Nietzsche’s allegory of the madman, and to a younger Foucault’s exaltation of the madness of Nietzsche and Artaud as a fundamental contestation of Western culture. These influential contributions still resonate, and imagery of madness and schizophrenia continues to emerge with such regularity in discussions about postmodern deconstruction that I want to begin this chapter in cautionary vein by reviewing some instances where madness has been seen, often by practising psychologists, as allegorising, exaggerating or even remedying a contemporary cultural condition.
