After the Middle Ages madness became like death. Madness is linked to man and his "weaknesses, dreams, and illusions" (26). Instead of something like a vice, it was a weakness. It was a death in life to be mad. For instead of truth and the world a madman understood only his own truth of himself, this creates a detachment from the world: death. It was death because it threatened life and reason. Madness took up the role of death, but also became linked to the theme of apocalypse, the end of the world. Foucault feels that madness was a way of expressing and locating concerns about the darker side of life and fear about the end of the world. Instead of the e

In our discussion last week this was said, by whom I do not know, but this is part of the notes I took: "To give into passion (which I take to become mad) is outside of reason, but at the same time it is natural (to give into passion)." Passion is natural; I don't think our passions have changed much at all from the caveman days to the present. But reason has evolved. Through written word, history, and education we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants in terms of the development of our reason. We cannot do this with passion, so this immutable passion is inherent and natural. If passion is natural and is phenomenon outside of reason then, is reason unnatural? Evolution is natural but the evolution of reason seemed to occur within people and outside of nature. So is it unnatural? I've held this question for some time and still without an answer, none even to call my own.

A contrast is made between madness in the Renaissance and in the present day, where it is located and isolated within certain medical and psychiatric disciplines, and marginalized within the world. So what is the definition of madness that we keep? A combination between the madness of death and unreason or the madness as a disease, charted and labeled...one or the other? He ends the chapter with the sentence "new requirements are being generated: A hundred and a hundred times have I taken up my lantern, seeking at high noon..." I think that he wants us to simply consider the role of madness in society. This sentence tells me that people are always reevaluating the idea of madness; so don't always take the most contemporary definition, always be in analysis. Like one of my history teachers used to tell me, "you have to hold your understanding of things like you hold a fish. Try to grasp it too rigidly and with too much strength, and its will slip away from you. Instead let it lay in your hand and give it ample room to wiggle."

In the Great Fear, a distrust and suspicion grew of the whole structure of confinement. Confinement became a bad place, comparable to the confinement of lepers. People feared disease spread from houses of confinement. Houses of confinement were seen as sites of corruption, and the madness within it was a disease of society. The fact that they were partly fears of the diseases that madmen could transmit involved doctors in the process of confinement, the doctor protected madmen and the public. In Rameau's Nephew, an eighteenth century literary piece, the character was aware of his madness, "you know I am ignorant, mad, impertinent, and lazy" (199). For the first time since the Great Confinement, the madman became a social individual.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Delirium Foucault, Rameau's Nephew, According Cervantes, Hopital Foucault, Middle Ages, Birth Asylum, Conclusion Foucault, Philippe Pinel's, Quixote Madness, Ship Fools, body soul, madness death, madman social individual, madness passion, passion passion, world madman, death madness, passion natural, detachment world, confinement lepers, houses confinement,
Approximate Word count = 1786
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)