Discussion → Michel Foucault

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Jul 22, 05:27pm

  
  

  "These people - who will no longer be us - will still have to consider this enigma (a little the way we do ourselves, when we try to understand today how Athens managed to fall in and out of love with the unreason of Alcibiades): how could men have searched for their truth, their essential words and their signs in a risk that made them tremble, and from which they could not avert their gaze, once it had caught their eye? This will seem even stranger to them than asking death about the truth of man; for death at least says what all men will be. Madness, on the other hand, is that rare danger, a chance that weighs little in relation to the fears that it engenders and the questions it is asked. How, in a culture, could so slim an eventuality come to hold such a power of revelatory dread?"

  Appendix I. Madness, the absence of an œuvre

  http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.historyofmadness.html

  Excellent readings by Foucault on the web site. Each of the writings leads organically to the others and many of the ideas inter-relate.

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