#unsuperseding

[the-chomsky-hash]

[C. It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty. The knowledge of madness is no exception - cont'd]

[3. Man's relation to madness was defined by both the external dimension of punishment and the internal dimension of moral assignation, becoming psychology: the natural truth of man - cont'd]

c. "Psychology" [since it needs to moralize a behavior before it can study it,] is merely a thin skin on the surface of the ethical world

in which modern man seeks his truth and loses it

[in which modern man demands to know until he then demands not to know]

Nietzsche, who has been accused of saying the contrary, saw this very clearly. As a result, a psychology of madness,

it cannot but be derisory

and yet it touches on the essential

i. It is derisory because,

— in wishing to carry out a psychology of madness, one is demanding

that psychology should undermine its own conditions

that it should turn back to that [negativity and abnormality in man] which made it possible

that [in acting as a positive science] it should circumvent what is for it, by definition, the unsupersedable [vis., the need to moralize a behavior before studying it]

— psychology can never tell the truth about madness because it is madness that holds the truth of psychology.

– Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, (Chapter 5: The Historical Constitution of Mental Illness), 1962. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

[the-chomsky-hash]

[A. The privileges that the clinic had recently recognized in observation were at the same time: the privileges of a pure immediate gaze, and those of a gaze equipped with a whole logical empriricist armature. We must now describe the concrete exercise of such a perception - cont'd]

[1. The observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless - cont'd]

[c. The opposition between and clinic and experiment: ‘The observer… reads nature, he who experiments questions’ - cont'd]

ii. It is this privilege of possessing an unsupersedable (indépassable) origin that the Double expresses in terms of causality:

‘observation must not be confused with experience;

the latter is the result or effect, the former the means or cause

observation leads naturally to experience’

– Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, (Chapter 7: Seeing and Knowing), 1963, translated from the French by A.M.Sheridan, 1973

[the-chomsky-hash]

[B. Two series of questions confront a pathological anatomy that wishes to be based on a nosology: the connexion between synchronic and diachronic, and the relation of death to life and disease - cont'd]

[2. In eighteenth-century medical thought death was both the absolute fact and the most relative of phenomena - cont'd]

[e. Life, disease, and death now at the turn of the nineteenth century form a technical and conceptual trinity - cont'd]

iv. The word decomposition must be allowed to stagger under the weight of its meaning. Analysis, the philosophy of elements and their laws, meets its death in what it had vainly sought in

mathematics

chemistry

even language

an unsupersedable model, prescribed by nature; it is on this great example that the medical gaze will now rest.

It is no longer that of a living eye, but the gaze of an eye that has seen death—a great white eye that unties the knot of life.

– Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, (Chapter 8: Open Up a Few Corpses), 1963, translated from the French by A.M.Sheridan, 1973

[the-chomsky-hash]

[E. Myths, destined to mask Condillac’s oscillating logic of a speech that makes it possible to see, are already engaging the clinic in new spatial figures, in which visibility becomes cloudy and the gaze is confronted by impenetrable shapes - cont'd]

[1. THE FIRST OF THESE EPISTEMOLOGICAL MYTHS CONCERNS THE ALPHABETICAL STRUCTURE OF DISEASE - cont'd]

b. This alphabetical structure of disease ensures not only that one can always return to the ‘unsupersedable’ (indépassable) element; it also ensures that the number of these elements will be finite and even small.

It is not first impressions that are diverse and apparently infinite, but their combination within a single disease:

just as the small number of modifications designated by the grammarians under the name of consonants’ is enough to give ‘to the expression of feeling the precision of thought’

so, for pathological phenomena, ‘with each new case, one might think that one is presented with new facts, whereas they are merely new combinations of facts. In the pathological state, there is never more than a small number of principal phenomena…. The order in which they appear, their importance, and their various relations are enough to give birth to every variety of disease’

– Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, (Chapter 7: Seeing and Knowing), 1963, translated from the French by A.M.Sheridan, 1973