442
JOHN ATHERTON
1657, which founded the
Hopital General
in Paris for the incarceratioo
of "indigent beggars." This act established a form of confinement
that
grouped together without distinction the poor, the sick, the criminal
and the demented. In the years that followed, a portion of the popula.
tion, to which previous generations had grown accustomed,
was
se–
questrated, as if its presence had suddenly become detrimental to the
proper functioning of society. Foucault traces, in the texts of hospital
records, court judgments and parliamentary acts, the successive definitions
by which the community, through its official spokesmen, identified those
that were to be excluded. In this process the mad lost the characteristics
by which they had been known and became, for the first
time,
indistinguishable from the larger category of the unproductive.
On first reading, these groupings appear, by tum, ignorant, cruel,
or simply naive. To a psychiatrist they might appear as the uncertain
first steps of a science still in its infancy. To Foucault they are something
quite different: if the legislators and judges of the classical period made
no distinction between the economically, the bodily and the mentally
deprived, it was not a confusion, but a deliberate attempt to assimilate
them to each other. Disparate though the symptoms might appear, they
were subsumed under a common heading-that of being fit for intern·
ment. Madness is not defined in terms of a fixed human nature; the
definition is inseparable from the social attitudes excluding madness.
Here we encounter the central problem of such a study. A history
of
madness is a paradoxical undertaking, since madness appears to lie outside
history. What better definition of folly is there than that which would see
in it an absence? Words, yet an absence of language, gestures, yet an
absence of works; behavior, in short, that lies in a senseless, timeless
region. To be sure, Foucault has gone to the words of the mad them·
selves as they appear in contemporary documents, but this irrational
language is always framed in the context of a rational discourse, whether
it be that of judge, doctor, or casual observer. While following
closely
these "objective" accounts, Foucault makes us aware that they give us but
one side of a confrontation between reason and unreason, in which the
other term of the couple is condemned to silence. A history of the insane,
in that it
is
written by the sane, is necessarily partial. It is in attempting
to overcome the impossibility of such a history that Foucault displays
his
originality, for in every definition that he examines (medical, legislative,
judicial) he brings the discusson back to the point at which madness
is separated from common experience; he interprets the successive acts
of segregation not as the gradual recognition of a permanent aspect of
