Quotessence
Home / Books / Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Book by Michel Foucault · 3 quotes · Madness, Men, Reason

Filter quotes by topic

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason Quotes

“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”

“Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”