ABSTRACT

Each of the four men who are the chosen subjects of a series of critical biographical discussions in the next four chapters came to cultural prominence having produced significant work deconstructing the hegemony of reason. All four at some stage in their lives experienced distress or madness, and three of them published critiques of psychiatry. All are also, to varying degrees, contradictory figures, not least insofar as their widely differing emancipatory impulses were mediated by an unavoidable immersion in, and response to, the patriarchal institutions of their times. As previously noted, Foucault continues to exert a profound influence on contemporary challenges to psychopathology, and on surrounding debates about subjectivity and identity. Since his contemporaries regarded his Madness and Civilisation (1961/1967) as autobiographically motivated, I wondered to what extent this eminent philosopher could be said to have written from direct experience. Foucault’s enthusiasm for Nietzsche, the huge influence of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy on postmodernism, his descent into madness, and recent reclamations of Dionysos as a model of masculinity, made me equally curious about the biographical experience of his nineteenth-century philosophical forebear. Given Nietzsche’s notorious deliberations on the ‘death of God’, and Foucault’s thoroughgoing critique of professional power and the medical gaze, I was fascinated to learn that both men had been expected to follow in the professional footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, and go into the church and into medicine, respectively. Clearly both were

responding to a very traditional patriarchal inheritance. Two further biographical chapters consider the stories of Antonin Artaud and Daniel Paul Schreber, whose declamations against psychiatry reflected nightmarish experiences of asylum life, and to some extent prefigure self-advocacy.1 The published material surrounding their lives is reconsidered for the considerable light it casts upon the interface between the politics of gender and ‘mental health’. Since both Artaud and Foucault located themselves within an intellectual lineage stemming from Nietzsche, it seems appropriate to assess their contributions to postmodern understandings of gender and distress using an approach that draws on Nietzsche’s genealogical conception of identity; and to discuss them in chronological order, before moving on to Daniel Schreber.