My thesis revolves around three axes: the Foucauldian critical-historical method, its relationship with enlightenment critique and the way this critique is implemented in Foucault’s seminal work, History of Madness. Foucault’s exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant’s philosophy, shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault’s adoption of ‘limit attitude’, which investigates the limits of our thinking as points of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, the thesis aims to dispel the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. A history of limits examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of psychiatric positivism. Foucault’s critique foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse.

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The essay brings together the work of Adorno, Blanchot and Deleuze insofar as their thinking gives rise to a reconfigured conception of the image. It seeks to determine the latter as it is developed across each of these philosophical oeuvres: the various functions the image comes to be assigned, the differing contexts to which it is tied and the respective models of thought it thereby generates. It does this in order to understand the sense in which, for each of these thinkers, a relation to the image in some way comes to be considered constitutive of thinking itself. This thesis receives its most explicit expression in the work of Deleuze, for whom the “image of thought” is that which must necessarily accompany philosophy in its creation of concepts, precisely as the latter’s condition. The essay considers the specific forms in which such an image is delineated within Deleuze’s own philosophy. From here it turns to Blanchot and the idiomatic definition of the image developed across both his theoretical and fictional writing as a movement of “turning away,” a movement which implies a certain understanding of the relation between sight and speech. Finally, the essay addresses Adorno’s conception of the history of thought as a determinate negation of the image, what it means for thought at a certain historical juncture to fall entirely under the imperative of the Bilderverboten, and thus to think on the basis of an “absence of images.”

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This thesis analyses the concept of sense in Deleuze’s early philosophy. I claim sense is an empirical process of understanding before a settled meaning has been attained. My analysis of Deleuze’s early works Nietzsche and Philosophy and Proust and Signs draws upon the empirical and rationalist tension between sense and meaning. For empiricists, in order to attain meaning, we must first make sense of the world and thereby associate experiential qualities to our ideas. They argue that without this process our ideas remain blank. In contrast, for rationalists, meaning is attained through rational reflection. This enables us to attain clarity in our understanding and achieve consensus. Without this process of rational reflection, our ideas remain chaotic, based upon a multiplicity of different perspectives. We are then presented with an either/or choice. Either we must accept the necessity of making sense and face the problems of conflict of interest. Or, by adhering to deductive reasoning, individuals can arrive at clarity but face the problem of blank ideas. Deleuze confronts the empirical and rationalist tension through the concept of sense and its relation to an apprenticeship. This joins Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche and Proust to Logic of Sense. It is through his analysis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass that an alternative answer is given. For Deleuze, we must make sense of the world but, at the same time, enable our understanding to be guided through a structure and methodology. That is to say, different methodologies and structures enable us to attain knowledge and educate others. What Deleuze makes us attentive to is a process of an experimental apprenticeship where methodological structures are continually challenged and made sense of. By practically applying structures, we attain meaning. Yet this meaning is novel because its sense follows from novel apprenticeship and experimentation. Following this. I claim that Deleuze does not seek either a purely rationalist or empirical approach, but rather, one that affirms both positions. This enables us to affirm the necessity of the process of making sense and of the novel attainment of meaning. This also enables an epistemological depth to be uncovered in early Deleuze through an analysis of his early works as studies of sense. My analysis of sense and language then develops the importance of epistemology and language in the philosophy of Deleuze, which at present remains still new and embryonic.

This thesis combines a practical phenomenological approach (based upon the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) with the theoretical criticism of W.J.T. Mitchell, in order to negotiate the function and effect of image and text interactions in three distinct forms of late medieval English 'mixed media': the Middle English ekphrastic poem, Pearl; the Middle English illustrated poem, A Disputation between the Body and Worms; and the elaborate mural painting of St Catherine of Alexandria preserved at St. Peter and Paul's Church in Pickering, North Yorkshire. It aims to give an account of these composite works of art not as historical cultural objects, but as lived - immediate, temporal and affective - phenomena, arguing that the lived experiences of medieval works of art are not entirely lost to us, but can be assessed through our modem contact with them. This study demonstrates how, in the absence of historical evidence, modem experience can provide valuable insight into how medieval works of art may have operated upon, and been experienced by, their medieval audiences. By combining a practical phenomenological approach with Mitchell's concept of the imagetext, the thesis shows that it is possible to move beyond the comparison of image and text in medieval media, and consider how visual and verbal modes interact within a medium when it is performed by a user. The thesis reveals the importance of the user in the study of medieval art, arguing that it is the user's perception, imagination and memory that form connections between image and text in medieval media. It advises that we must examine the role of the user of the medieval works of art if we are to advance our understanding of the function and effect of image and text interactions, and offers three case studies of how this research could be undertaken.

This thesis argues for a constructivist reading of Gilles Deleuze's early philosophy. In the introduction I outline why I consider Deleuze's philosophical project - from the 1950s to the 1990s - to centre on the problem of immanence (the "plane of immanence"), which for Deleuze is inseparable from its "construction" by various means, including language. The term "onto-logic" is used to capture this notion of immanence as constructed by language, and I claim that "univocal sense" is the name of this immanence during Deleuze' s 1960s works. In Part I, I then show in detail how Deleuze derives his conception of univocal sense from the work of - principally - Nietzsche and Spinoza. I propose that Nietzsche's and Spinoza's critiques of the forms of Man and God are marshalled and transformed by Deleuze, offering a third alternative to the deadlock: either transcendental critique or pre-critical metaphysics. I also show that Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, and Bergson, entails a provisional dualism of Being and Thinking giving way to a monism, thanks to a constructivist "logic" of expression, which is where I locate the original site of Deleuze's "plane of immanence" . In Part Il, I extend this framework to the specific terrain of Deleuze's engagement with the structuralist paradigm - particularly in the guise of Lacanian psychoanalysis - in his texts from the late 1960s, especially The Logic of Sense. I show through detailed analysis how Deleuze constructs a theory of language in this text, a theory which uses the tools of structuralism and psychoanalysis to argue that - thanks to the psychoanalytic "phantasm" - corporeal bodies and the ideal propositional forms of language co-articulate to express univocal sense. The univocal sense expressed by the phantasm merges the dualism of bodies and language ~ Being and Thinking - which produced sense as their own surfaceeffect, a veritable case of Deleuzian immanence.

This thesis examines the concept of emancipation inrelation to the writings of Jean- Paul Sartre. I interpret emancipation as a series of what I call transjormative moments. These moments reveal a conceptual continuity of Sartre's engagement with this theme which unites his early and late philosophy whilst also challenging common readings of his oeuvre. I begin the investigation by exploring the implications of Being and Nothingness as an example of what Sartre claims is an unconuerted ontology. Explicating the unique way in which Sartre presents the concepts of the "individual" and "social" I provide evidence for the varied ways in which Sartre's early writings display an awareness of power structures and social/political critique. The emancipatory devices I call transformative moments are play, and two types of Apocalypse (the festival and the group-in-fusion). I proceed with a senes of close textual readings which focus on the importance of play. Play acts as a foundation for the final two transformative moments. In both types of moments my interpretation reveals underacknowledged, recurrent motifs (appropriation and the problem of the "Self') throughout Sartre's work. Considering Sartre's controversial statement regarding the revolutionary as serious, I argue against commentators who interpret this passage as an example of political naivety. I contend that Sartre's critique of the revolutionary is a unique example of political analysis in his early writing.

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