ABSTRACT
Foucault’s Histoire de la folie presents the thesis that neither scientific nor moral conceptions of mental illness can be adequately understood except in relation to the establishment of secular reason as supreme arbiter of the natural order. It was the establishment of a godlike subjective reason which resulted in the transformation of madness from an ontological to a physical-moral condition, and which denied its existence as transgression or even as humble difference. Foucault speaks, metaphorically, of this coming of reason as the Decision. He thinks of it as an extended event which took place in the seventeenth century. He saw that the advent of this reason required, as a matter of logical and political necessity, the exclusion and delegitimation of all those forms of thinking, acting and being which did not harmonize with this new despotic rationality. Some aspects of the absolute intolerance of reason to any opposition are still clearly with us today, and are found in the oppositions which many of us take for granted. Amongst these utterly confident oppositions, we might mention those between right and wrong, true and false, normal and pathological, sane and insane. What Foucault cannot speak of, however, are those unstable configurations which might emerge from outside our frameworks of thought. If such other configurations actually once had a place alongside those forms of being which are more familiar to us, they have been banished and we can hardly even guess at what they were.
