Michel Foucault's archaeology of the silence of madness in the age of reason
circumvents the discipline of psychiatry by refusing to contest the latter on its
own terms. The success of Foucault's project of giving voice to the mad is
achieved, however, at the expense of neglecting a long history of resistance to the
silencing of madness, to which autobiographical writings by people said to be
mad have contributed.
The first phase of my dissertation focuses on mind-problem memoirs
published since the late 1960s, a period in which an international psychiatric
survivor movement has emerged. My readings of these memoirs examine how
they elaborate ways of negotiating encounters with psychiatry in everyday life,
and how they reveal the contingency of naturalized psychiatric practices.
The second phase begins with the identification of certain questions that
are not prominent among the concerns of political activists struggling to displace
the psychiatric system. In the course of articulating a critique of narrative, I
introduce the phrase "order of making sense" to describe a moral injunction—to
respond and contribute to narrative reason—that acts as a regulative ideal.
The third phase consists of fragmentary writing about personal
experiences that, in spite of being framed by competing theoretical perspectives,
destabilize boundaries. My increasing emphasis on the body, understood as a
multiplicity of forces that are not amenable to the formation of coherent
subjectivity, opens up the possibility of a revaluation of non-knowledge and the
absence of work.
The fourth phase concludes a dissertation whose unanticipated
discontinuities are both caused by, and a mode of expression of, persistent mind
problems. With the delineation of a post-Nietzschean aesthetic of the materialist
sublime, the political strategies of psychiatric survivors, including my critique of
narrative, are surpassed by the intensities of unproductive expenditure.
Until mind problems are no longer pathologized as troubled being that
stands in need of direction, the project of overcoming the condition of internal
exile remains imperative. Yet it is the anti-project of exceeding sense—through an
affirmation of being troubled by eternal recurrence—that most exposes the limits
of the age of reason. / Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/18995 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Ingram, Richard Andrew |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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