Following on from the previous class, next week we will reflect together on Michel Foucault’s text, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1972).
We suggest reading the Preface and two excerpts available here, from the edition published by Editora Perspectiva, translated by José Teixeira Coelho Netto.
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“Dreaming is a more common and also more universal experience than madness”; “The madman is not always wrong about everything”; “Madness only affects, in a contingent and partial way, certain regions of sensory perception.”
Now, Descartes does not say that dreaming “is more common and also more universal than madness.” Nor does he say that madmen are only mad from time to time and only in certain respects. Let us listen to him before evoking people who “constantly assert that they are kings.” Do these men who take themselves for kings, or who believe they have a body of glass, have a madness that is more intermittent than dreams?
Music
Concerts
ganavya presents ‘Nilam’ – ZDB at B.Leza
Thu16.10.2509:30PM
