DESCRIPTION:
This book explores how the continental philosophical tradition in the 20th century attempted to understand madness as madness. It traces the paradoxical endeavour of reason attempting to understand madness without dissolving the inherent strangeness and otherness of madness. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contributions of phenomenology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and anti-psychiatry to continental philosophy and psychiatry.
The book outlines an intellectual tradition of psychiatry that is both fascinated by and withdraws from madness. Madness is a lure for philosophy in two senses as both trap and provocation. It is a trap because this philosophical tradition constructs an otherness of madness so profound, that it condemns madness to silence. However, the idea of madness as another world is also a fertile provocation because it respects the non-identity of madness to reason. The book concludes with some critical reflections on the role of madness in contemporary philosophical thought.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
Part I
"A Subtle, Pervasive and Strangely Uncertain Light": Jaspers on Understanding Madness
"As Strange to Me as the Birds in the Garden": Bleuler, Jung and the Creation of Schizophrenia
A Distance from All That Is Human: Freud and Psychosis
Part II
Vital Contact
Ipseity
The Body
Being-in-the-World
Part III
"The World Cannot Acknowledge Its Own Madness": Alienation and the Destruction of Experience
Reification and Schizophrenia: A Socio-pathological Parallelism
"Beware, Marcuse"!
"O My Body_": Fanon and the Pathologies of Recognition
Part IV
"In the Distance of Madness": Foucault and the History of Madness
The Lure of Madness
Lacan: The Shadow of Madness
The Ineffable and Limit-experience
Part V
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
A Germinal Anti-Psychiatry: R.D. Laing""s Wild Empathy
"It all began with a `no""": The Institution Negated
Epilogue: The End of Madness?
