The Illusion of History illusion of history: time and the radical political imagination

11. Genealogy: The Menippean Character of History

222 11 Genealogy The Menippean Character of History The Undifferentiated Difference of Unreason Let us approach the problem of history more from Foucault’s direction. Perhaps his spatial history is no random illusion of it, but instead a kind of perverse heightening and intensification of history in order to provoke the carrier of its message. History is turned upside down and fragmented as though it is an accusation against those who made it. Like a disturbed self-mutilator who cuts himself to know of his existence, Foucault dissects history— cutting it up to know that it lives, to see the blood flow from its brittle skin of progress, succession, and continuity, and thus to source the deeper meaning of being human. This psychological metaphor of history is not so flippant if you consider how concerned Foucault was to show the role of madness in history’s production . Foucault makes great gashes on history’s surface not to throw doubt upon history, but to throw doubt upon man. Foucault approaches the venture of man from that which we deny, those monsters of reason’s sleep that we keep manacled by the vigilant wakefulness of thought. He wishes to redirect Kant’s formulation negatively. What we say about man is not true; it is what we deny of him, what we don’t say, what we silence of man that Genealogy  223 is his truth. Where once the question, “What is man?” was the beginning of our definition, now the question, “What isn’t man?” betrays who we really are. In this respect madness becomes the sounding board of reason, as how we treat it and how we relate ourselves to it become the dark foundation upon which reason builds itself. In the words of John D. Caputo, Foucault is exploring a “hermeneutics of not knowing who we are.” Seen from here, Foucault’s rejection of a transcendental consciousness is less a rejection than an accusation that such transcendence is just a panic-ridden and pompous flight away from our more murky and troubled consciousness. To say man does not exist is just an extreme way of saying that we do not truly know ourselves. Foucault cut his earliest philosophical teeth by meditating on the relationship between reason and unreason. This pursuit of otherness, of ulterior history, places Foucault in a familiar and well-trodden firmament of thought. Foucault himself examines his precursors in Madness and Civilisation. He mentions the “earthbound spectators” of madness, Goya, Brueghel, and Bosch, whose dark, everyday, and immediate pictorial imaginings are snapshots of life suffused with mixtures of dangerous psychosis and thoughtless idiocy. The more objective, divine perspective of an Erasmus appears in his In Praise of Folly, where the world takes on a maddening hue, thanks to the humanistic, scholarly distance that eliminates participation in the lunacy of worldly machinations. There are the great Renaissance dramatists, Cervantes and Shakespeare, where madness becomes allied with death, a dark knowledge of having gone too far, seen too much, been exposed for too long. As a constant reminder of human fallacy and finitude, madness carries an entirely negative value, but it is still assigned the seminal role of a self in reckoning. Foucault sees madness as in some way fraternal with art, scholarship, and literature. Foucault also makes heroes of those more modern carriers of madness’s message, heroes who are able to receive its faint transmissions in a world that had almost blocked out its fury. Succumbing to its power, becoming carriers of its extremes, and being able to leave literary artifacts of their experience, writers like Nietzsche, Artaud, and Holderlin skirted this knowledge. Yet Foucault’s immediate precursor is his disgraced countryman Louis Ferdinand Céline, a writer who forced dreams through reality and traced the hallucinatory provocations of the world. Though Céline never succumbed individually to lunacy, he became a 224  Michel Foucault willing participator in the madness of his century via his involvement in Nazism and anti-Semitism. Among the madness, fevered observation, and pained pessimist polemic of his work Journey to the End of the Night, he has one of his characters, a disgruntled and cynical psychiatrist, proclaim a demented new world order. He begins by declaring the doomed fate of human reason, a delirious exercise more resembling madness that will amount to nothing. He then proposes a curative: “Ferdinand, is it not true that in the face of a truly...