Of madness itself

A history of madness itself … Michel Foucault spoke of such a project in the preface to the first French edition of Histoire de la folie. Many have quoted these words as if they both encapsulated the romantic dream that inspired Foucault’s project and condemned it to incoherence. ¹ Even Foucault was later to suggest that he was prey to a certain epistemological naivety in Histoire de la folie, tempted to found his analysis upon something intrinsic to the wild power of madness prior to its capture by the knowledges and apparatuses of society. ² How could one recover the past experiences of madness itself when they are known to us only in the forms in which they have been structured by reason and can be grasped only through our present rules of sense? How could one write of madness itself without transforming it by those forms of reason in which writing partakes? How could Foucault, whose whole work is committed to the radical historicity of the objects of knowledge and power, speak of madness itself?