Refracted Input

Clare O’Farrell’s blog on books, TV, films, Michel Foucault, universities etc. etc.

Foucault, Radio Interview 2: Madness silenced

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

July 29, 2025

Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge Classique. Entretien avec Michel Foucault. Diffusion le 11 juillet 1961 sur France III National. In Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024, pp. 17-19.

Francisco Goya. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. c. 1797-8.

[…] no other society except ours, grants the status of mental illness alone to the madman. In all other societies, the status of the mad is much more complex and in a sense richer. The mad have a religious significance, a magical significance. The madman is out in the open, his manifestations eagerly awaited with attempts made to decypher them. But this kind of annihilation by psychology, medicine and mental pathology is characteristic of our culture; and up to a certain point at least, it’s an impoverishment. (p.19) [1]

One of the engaging features of Foucault’s work is the myriad of different angles from which he approaches his various ideas, and his ongoing subtle, and sometimes not so subtle revisions subsequent to his first formulation of an idea. This creates complex layers of meaning from different perspectives, rather like viewing a faceted precious stone from different angles and in different lights. In this context, and in the general context of these early interviews by Foucault, I would like to draw attention to work done by librarians at the Henri Piéron library in Paris on annotated copies by Foucault of his principal doctoral thesis on the history of madness and complementary thesis on Kant (Le Doeuff & Lesage, 2025). Even in these early annotations, we can see Foucault’s characteristic shifts in thinking, his introduction of new nuances and angles. There is never a fixed end point in his writing; it is always exploratory and experimental rather than didactic. As he once said, he always thought and hoped the book he had just written would be his last, but then he found that it raised even further problems – both for himself and others – which he felt obliged to address.

In the second interview in the Entretiens Radiophoniques we see a continuation of this process, adding to the general difficulty and complexity of interpreting Foucault’s position on any given concept. In combination with Foucault’s often poetic and literary style, this can produce effects that are either exciting or baffling for readers. Frédéric Gros, who has edited and written extensively about Foucault’s work, comments on this, explaining he was ready to abandon the idea of an academic career before reading the History of Madness, but found Foucault’s work so intriguing that he decided it was worth it after all:

‘I didn’t understand a word, but I was captivated by the gritty texture of the text. I was impressed, seduced and carried away by the movement of the writing. There was something like a kind of lyrical inspiration there. I couldn’t get my bearings and had trouble distinguishing what was important from what was incidental in the text. It was a real experience of strangeness’ (Gros, 2025).

Others, however, have found this effect highly irritating– notably a number of Foucault’s early English language critics – a problem compounded by translations of varying quality and a translation of History of Madness, which while a wonderful literary work, was a rendition of an abridged version of the huge original volume (Foucault, 1965). Writing in 1980, James Clifford voices his exasperation:

‘His well-known stylistic excesses, his confusing redefinitions, abandonments of positions, and transgressions of his own methodological rules may well be aspects of an ironic program designed to frustrate any coherent formulation, and thus ideological confiscation of his writing. Foucault’s work will not occupy any permanent ground […]’ (Clifford 1980: 213).

Another critic, G.S. Rousseau, himself not averse to a spot of literary hyperbole, in one of the more substantial early articles in English on Foucault wants to cover all bases:

‘Poet, Romantic, Blakean heretic, romantic pessimist, imaginative rationalist thriving on the lure of the Platonic “One and the Many”, universalist terrified of the possibility of an empty nominalistic universe, child of Hegel and brother of Nietsche – Foucault is all of these […] Furthermore [he is] Eliotan and modern’ (Rousseau, 1972-3: 250).

But turning more directly to the subject of today’s post – the second radio interview: Foucault clarifies something that has confused many critics of History of Madness. Madness operates at two levels in his work. There is the everyday lived experience of madness in all its bodily, social and historical materiality and then there is its symbolic, poetic and cultural function, emerging in artistic and imaginative works as an indicator of truth (p.18). These are two separate if intertwined experiences. Many critics have accused him of romanticising the sufferings of mad people and wanting to return to the good old pre-scientific days before the advent of the scientific systems of psychiatry and the other psy and medical disciplines. [2] But Foucault is really arguing against the reduction of madness to mere mental illness – saying that it is far more in addition to this. Nonetheless, the critics may have a point. In History of Madness, there is more than a hint of what looks like a nostalgia for the times when madness was crowned sovereign in the imagination of the limits, speaking with the voice of truth about the limited place of humans in time and space and the inevitability of suffering and death.

In the second interview in Entretiens Radiophoniques, there is a subtle shift away from this flirtation with an essentialist and universalist link between madness and truth. Foucault argues here that madness is only visionary if a society allows it to be. He specifies that this vision ‘is not a property of the nature of madness; it is simply a series of divisions that are made within a culture’ (p.18). He goes on to argue that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, literary, artistic and theatrical expressions were given free reign. He traces the muzzling of the visionary force of madness in Western societies and the dousing of the truth it was able to reveal and communicate through culture and art. The ‘tragic experience’ of madness, as he writes in History of Madness (HF: 27-37), reveals the strangeness and disorder of the world – the possibility of the eruption of chaos and human extinction. It is a reminder that the technological systems, reason and order humans seek to impose on existence are not boundless.

Why did madness lose its voice? Foucault argues that the growth of economic mercantilism, the rise of the bourgeoisie and attempts to establish a rational society which saw madness as the direct opposite and negation of reason were major factors (p.18). There is a perception, particularly in the older secondary literature on Foucault, that before 1970 he ignored social and political realities and had nothing to say on these fronts. This view was to some extent encouraged by Foucault himself in some of his later writings. But already, his critique of a society based on the elevation of the importance of money, productivity, work and economic exchange is apparent. In such a society: ‘it is clear that there is no place for people like the mad’ (p. 19).

But in spite of the best efforts of these nascent forms of economic rationalism, there was still enough “explosive force” (p. 18) in madness for it to re-emerge and Foucault cites the work of Goya and Sade at the end of the eighteenth century as a demonstration that attempts to silence and ignore the limits and the threat of disorder can never be successful. Again, there is a subtle change with respect to the arguments in History of Madness. In the latter, the work of Sade and Goya is a sign that the silencing of madness was ‘merely an eclipse’ (HF: 27) rather than the dying embers of a once vital incendiary force. They are a prophetic sign of an age to come – one of unbridled dominance over the non-human environment and the dissolution of human community into a solipsistic individualism driven by wants that can never be satisfied.

Foucault expands on the ‘half light’ and ‘twilight’ of Goya’s images of madness in History of Madness (HF: 361) noting: ‘[Goya] renews a connection, beyond memory, with the old worlds of enchantment, of fantastical rides, of witches perched on the branches of dead trees’ (HF: 531). But it is a madness spinning in the void. It is a sign of a new order where man reigns supreme with complete dominance over the physical, social and natural world. Unlike the earlier work of Bosch or Brueghel, these images are not connected to the physical world and our material environment. As Foucault puts it poetically: ‘no star lights up the night of the great human bat-like creatures to be seen in the Way of Flying. What tree supports the branch where the witches cackle?’ – we see ‘no landscape, no walls and no décor’ (HF:531). Madness reveals a new truth: ‘[it] has become the possibility in man of abolishing both man and the world’ (HF: 532).

As for Sade, his work annihilates nature and human community: ‘Sade casts man into a void that dominates nature from afar, in a total absence of proportion or community, in the endlessly recommenced non-existence of satisfaction’ (HF: 533-34). Centuries later, we see the echo of this logic in the endless scroll of social media and isolation into curated individual feeds on individual screens. Foucault continues: ‘this whole society, whose sole bond is the refusal of any bond, appears to be a radical dismissal of nature […] and the free exercise of sovereignty over and against nature’ (HF: 533). By ‘nature’, Foucault means not just the non-human world but the embeddedness and intrinsic belonging of humans to the material world within a network of social existence with other humans.

Madness becomes the revelation of a nihilist violence – a dark mirror of what was to come – revealing the possibility of the destruction of relations both human and non-human and their material support. It becomes a sign of a society which holds up as an ideal an unlimited dominance, dismissal and exploitation of the physical environment in the service of an isolated sovereign individual unconstrained by social and community relations or even by physical materiality. It is the indulgence of desires and ‘freedoms’ to infinity in a featureless virtual void without space or the time of bodies and seasons. Hence the digital nomad, freely drifting from country to country with only a virtual connection to a workplace. As many practising this lifestyle have found – it can become a miserable, lonely and ultimately unproductive existence in the absence of embedded ongoing community ties and rituals (Bratt, 2025).

But as Foucault recognises himself, perhaps he made too close and essential a link in History of Madness between madness and a certain awareness of the truth of our limited human condition, its crumbling into disorder and the possibility of our extinction. He very quickly replaces madness with death as the historical vehicle of this experience in his 1963 books Raymond Roussel and The Birth of the Clinic (See O’Farrell, 1989: 79-84).

If we take Foucault’s idea of a “tragic experience” and loosen its ties with madness and death, where might we see it today? Perhaps we can see it in the cultural production around climate change and environmental degradation – in the awareness of the threat to the equilibrium of Gaia. This is the imaginative and mythological term famously used by scientist James Lovelock to refer to the earth systems and environmental network within which humans are embedded (Lovelock, 2021; See also Latour, 2017). Associated with this is the rapidly increasing threat of the machine – so called generative ‘AI’ and the Large Language Models which turn human communication into a magical machine gushing out words at lightning speed far beyond the speed of human speech and writing, and powered at the material level by the twin exploitation and extraction of environmental resources and human slave labour (Cant et al, 2024; Muldoon, 2024). All this has physical consequences either directly or indirectly for living conditions and generates social, cultural and political instability as people struggle for resources, power and territory in the face of accelerating inequities in distribution.

As Latour and others insistently argue, we may be currently witnessing a new and genuine Copernican shift– a radical decentering of the anthropological perspective (Latour 1992; 2024). The new geological sciences are revelatory of just where humans stand in the immense expanses of geological time and the disproportionately destructive effect of our technologies – to the point where, as some argue, we may extinguish ourselves just as surely as the previous five geological extinctions (Kolbert, 2014). In History of Madness Foucault cites Ronsard writing in 1562:

“Justice and Reason have flown back to Heaven
And in their place, alas, reign brigandage, Hatred, rancour, blood and carnage” (HF:25) [3].

Ronsard was writing in an era that very much believed it was living in the end times. If these phrases resonate today, it is because we are living in an age where the dread of end times is once again upon us.
 
Notes

[1] The translation of ‘le fou’ poses a certain number of problems in English. In French grammar, ‘le fou’ can be used in a general sense to designate both males and females. It can also be used to designate a male in particular. A separate word ‘la folle’ is used for a mad woman in particular.

[2] For a summary of some of these criticisms see O’Farrell 1989, pp. 78-9.

[3] For background on Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps see https://odysseum.eduscol.education.fr/discours-des-miseres-de-ce-temps-introduction-generale
 
References

Emily Bratt, ‘My mind was shrieking: “What am I doing?”’ – when the digital nomad dream turns sour, The Guardian, 1 Jul 2025.

Callum Cant, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Feeding the Machine, The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., London: Bloomsbury Press, 2024.

James Clifford, Review of Orientalism by Edward Said, History and Theory, 19, 1980, pp. 204-23.

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard, London: Routledge, 1997 [originally published 1967].

Michel Foucault, History of Madness. Ed. Jean Khalfa. Trans. Jonathan Murphy, Jean Khalfa, London and New York: Routledge 2006. [abbreviated as HF].

Frédéric Gros, “Selon Foucault, la folie n’est rien d’autre que l’inquiétude de la raison”, France Culture, Publié le vendredi 21 février 2025. Radio program, podcast.

Eliabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014.

Bruno Latour, One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World, in Ernan McMullin (editor), The Social Dimensions of Science, Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1992, pp. 272-292.

Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

Bruno Latour, If we lose the earth, we lose our souls, trans. Catherine Porter, Sam Ferguson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024.

Emmanuel Le Doeuff et Thierry Lesage, À la découverte des thèses annotées de Michel Foucault, Panacée, 28/02/2025.

James Lovelock, We belong to Gaia. London: Penguin Random House, 2021.

James Muldoon (interviewed by Sabrina Provenzani), AI is an extraction machine. But resistance is possible, The Citizens, Sep 17, 2024.

Clare O’Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?. London: Macmillan, 1989. Ebook edition 2016.

G.S. Rousseau, Whose Enlightenment? Not Man’s: The case of Michel Foucault, Eighteenth Century Studies, 1972-73, 6, pp. 238-256.

I have used multiple pens, inks and papers to write this post, but will nominate the pen I began writing the post with. It is the same pen and ink as in a previous post – the BENU 2024 Christmas Astrogem and Jacques Herbin 1670 Violet impérial ink with gold shimmer. This photo shows the pen resting on a delightful weight lifting crab pen holder designed by Tanaka Minoru. These plastic crabs come in a variety of colours.

The impatient writer

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

March 25, 2025

Portrait de Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet, c. 1848-9. Musée Fabre.

Most writers struggle to a greater or lesser degree with the blank page. In a newsletter post titled “Perfectionism vs Impatience”, the academic and scholarly writing coach, Jo VanEvery, deals with the difficulty of producing that first draft of writing and refers to the much cited advice to just put pen to paper and write anything no matter how bad and imperfect. The idea is that then you have at least something that can be painstakingly edited and polished to finally produce a refined and well-crafted end product. She uses wood carving as an analogy. From a rough lump of wood still with the bark on, working with ever more refined and sophisticated tools you eventually arrive at a beautiful smooth and polished work of art. [1]

What struck me in VanEvery’s discussion was the idea that it is not always classical procrastination or perfectionism that prevents those first tentative words from being laid down on the blank page, but impatience. Impatience at not being able to produce the well-crafted piece of writing straight away. This impatience is not just something that applies to writing – it also applies to other skills and crafts. How many people would like to play a musical instrument but faced with the arduous and seemingly infinite difficulty of getting beyond those first steps simply cannot stay the distance through that tortuous tedium to arrive at what they hear accomplished musicians producing? Even for the skilled writer, it can simply take too long. There is the research, the formulation of ideas, the structuring and restructuring, the refining of word use to create meaning and style, the search for the right rhythms in phrase composition – all of this takes time and constant re-adjustment. And when writing is only one of the many life jobs on one’s plate, the process seems too stretched out altogether. You just want to see that final product out there, done and dusted, published and added to your cumulative pile of public writing.

This struggle with patience has been no less a factor in the production of this current piece which has gone through multiple restructures, additions and subtractions not to mention meanders down decidedly dubious culs de sac. But this time, armed with the image of the impatient writer, I have tried deliberately, if painfully, to lean into the experience and observe its mechanisms. I am reminded of the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) snuffs out a match with his bare fingers and says “the trick… is not minding that it hurts”. The Mandalorian would add stoically: “This is the way”…

James Horton, a freelance writer and social scientist, very usefully outlines a series of “toxic preconditions” that block writing production and proposes a set of counter-practices. He summarises these toxic preconditions as “misguided beliefs about what writing must be in order to be ‘worth it’”, continuing “If you decide that all of your writing must be important, done once and done right” then you are doomed from the outset. No amount of determined will-power or anxious perusal of self-help literature will drag you out of the hole. [2]

Perhaps, for me personally, one of the most toxic preconditions, a variation on the notion that writing has to be important, is the perceived obligation to be totally original, to be at the avant-garde cutting edge. This of course is a modernist hangover – the idea that one needs to break with tradition and advance knowledge and culture at any cost. Finding that others have already said what you wanted to say – and so much better! – in a world crowded with voices all striving to be heard has an utterly paralysing and silencing effect (I have discussed this in an earlier post.) You have no right to speak unless what you have to say is utterly original and ground-breaking and includes references to every last piece of research in the area. Feeding into this, is the pressure of the academic requirement to make one’s name and reputation and to carve out a unique professional niche. Further added to the mix are the effects of growing up and forming an early career marinated in the extraordinary explosion of new thought and culture that occurred at the end of the Second World War.

Neither should we forget the everyday environmental preconditions for writing. For those employed to write – and let’s restrict the arena to universities here – there are the ongoing and immense pressures to do a whole host of other things (teaching, admin etc.) at a breakneck pace. How can the slow rhythms of writing be accommodated within this setting? There is the additional requirement to squeeze writing into rigid formats such as the peer reviewed journal article, framed within a bureaucratic structure of byzantine reporting processes and metricisation. The latter mechanism banishes the content of writing into the void. Accumulated and carefully categorised publications become mere tokens to be exchanged for other goods such as reputation, job appointments, continued employment and promotion. [3] The overall effect of all this can be utterly immobilising. Now I am no longer in this environment, I can feel the faint stirrings of mobility slowly returning and the frozen tundra gradually reawakening.

But to step back from all this and to turn to the philosophical and existential context of writing practice: what is this strange urge to write? I think here of Foucault’s anecdote about a friend of the painter Gustave Courbet, who would wake up shouting “I want to judge! I want to judge!” [4] I have a similar impulse when it comes to writing, but just like the declaration of Courbet’s friend, “I want to write!” is far too abstract. Write what about what and for whom and why write in the first place? Let’s exclude extrinsic motivations such as the desire to be rich and famous (only achieved by a vanishingly small few), the desire to deliver information, teach or persuade, or to “express oneself” or again, the necessity to write as part of one’s employment or qualification requirements. Let’s take these conditions off the table for the purposes of this discussion and reduce the writing impulse to its most obscurely existential form. Not to write, for those subject to this mysterious drive, provokes considerable malaise. As Foucault notes:

One thing is certain, that there is, I think, a very strong obligation to write. I don’t really know where this obligation to write comes from … You are made aware of it in a number of different ways. For example, by the fact that you feel extremely anxious and tense when you haven’t done your daily page of writing. In writing this page you give yourself and your existence a kind of absolution. This absolution is indispensable for the happiness of the day. [5]

So what do you do with this impulse? The classic writing clichés exhort the aspirant to “write about what you know” or “write the kind of books you want to read”. And there are any number of writing sites and apps providing lists of “writing prompts” each more unbearably insipid than the last. And, as Horton also points out, the old chestnut “just write” is also resoundingly empty – a bit like saying “LOL just win”, shades of the famous Nike advertising slogan…

But perhaps after all, this is all you really have to start with. You can only start by establishing a tentative experimental practice. Begin with a version of free or directed automatic writing practice – such as that engaged in by the surrealists and recommended as a beginner exercise in writing technique handbooks. Then hope that eventually you will see something slowly solidifying and emerging out of the thick fog – a direction, a style, a subject matter, a feeling that the impulse has finally started to carve out a defined track in the wilderness and develop a concrete form. You begin by writing for an audience of one – yourself – then, with the hope that others may find a connection across the network of shared human experience, culture and history, as well as across the broader shared network of non-human existence.

Public writing could be envisaged as a journey for the writer with the goal of providing an artefact for the reader. But the final product only works if the reader has a sense of that difficult trajectory. Writing that is too facile and superficial or too subordinated to an external agenda, that doesn’t involve at least some personal engagement on the part of the writer has little lasting impact on the reader. (Dare I raise the spectre of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Chat GPT at this point?) Foucault introduces the notion of the book as experience, which rather than being a didactic exercise instructing and “teaching” the reader, invites readers instead to make sense of the book and what it has to offer within the context of their own experience and concerns. [6] A reader accompanies the author on at least a part of his or her expedition and launches out onto branching paths of their own. The ultimate value of writing is perhaps in this shared journey along a dusty dirt track laboriously fashioned by the writer out of many detours, dead ends and narrowly avoided precipices.

References and notes

[1] See also Jo VanEvery’s book, The Scholarly Writing Process (A Short Guide), 2016.

[2] With thanks to Oliver Burkeman for this reference to Horton in his newsletter post “Toxic preconditions” The Imperfectionist, 14 March 2025.

[3] See Conor Heaney’s discussion about university work as “meaningless” within the context of neoliberal governmentality. Conor Heaney, ‘What is the University today?’, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 13 (2), 2015, 287-314.

[4] Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. 323. For a full quotation of this passage see my earlier blog post.

[5] Michel Foucault, (2004) [1969] Michel Foucault à Claude Bonnefoy – Entretien Interprété par Éric Ruf et Pierre Lamandé, Paris: Gallimard. CD. [This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell] For additional commentary on this passage see my earlier blog post.

[6] Michel Foucault, (2000) [1981] “Interview with Michel Foucault. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press, pp. 243-5.

This post was drafted with fountain pen and ink. The pen of choice this time is a lovely green Aurora Optima Primavera, number 2482 of a limited edition of 7,500 fountain pens, manufactured in 1998. It features a variety of subtle design details, for instance two swallows heralding spring engraved into the gold plated clip. Aurora is a high end Italian manufacturer of some quite beautiful and very functional pens. The ink is a very dark green from Nahvalur.

Foucault, Radio Interview 1: The phenomenon of madness

Clare O'Farrell

8 comments

February 18, 2025

Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Nicole Brice. Enquêtes et commentaires. Diffusion le 31 mai 1961 sur France III National. In Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024, pp. 13-16

Van Gogh, The Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige) 1887

It seemed to me that madness was a somewhat variable phenomenon in civilisation, It fluctuated just as much as any other cultural phenomenon. Basically, when reading American books about how some primitive civilisations reacted to the phenomenon of madness, I wondered whether it might be interesting to look at the way in which our own culture reacted to this phenomenon. […] There are civilisations which celebrated the mad, others that kept them separate, others that cared for them. But what I really wanted to emphasise was that caring for the mad was not the only possible reaction to the phenomenon of madness. (p. 13)

This interview – the first in the book – was conducted in 1961 after the publication of Foucault’s 1961 book on madness and succinctly summarises the broad arguments of that work.

It’s hard to appreciate today just how novel Foucault’s approach was in the early 1960s. He argued that madness was culturally and historically variable – variations that couldn’t simply be explained away by stating they were pre-scientific and the mere products of superstition and ignorance. “There is no culture without madness” (p. 13) Foucault says, but the way it has been treated across cultures and history differs considerably. Foucault explains he wanted to study one specific cultural and historical instance, namely how madness was conceptualised and dealt with in Europe in the Classical Age (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).

What is also clear in this interview – in the light of future misunderstandings – is that Foucault was not arguing that madness was a purely socio-cultural invention. Madness had a physical and real existence – it was a matter of different conceptualisations of a physical phenomenon.

After the “completely free existence” (p. 14) led by mad people up until the beginning of the seventeenth century, the mad, along with other designated social misfits who failed to satisfactorily earn their keep according to the economic notions of the day, were locked up in institutions and made to produce cloth, rope and similar goods. This again proved to be too costly a solution and the institutions were closed down, leaving the mad to occupy these otherwise abandoned social spaces. Eventually we arrive at a culture – our own – in which “the phenomenon of madness has been hijacked by medicine. For us, the mad are mentally ill” (p. 15).

The interviewer finishes with one final left of field question (among others): “Do you think madness is a gift from heaven?” Foucault’s response is a very roundabout “yes”. He argues that in contemporary culture madness has once again become “extraordinarily important”, rediscovering its mission as a bearer of truth (p. 16). He enlists some of his favourite figures in support of his claim– Nietzsche, Artaud, Roussel and Van Gogh [1] – philosophers, writers and artists who were famously mad and who through their work re-awakened the capacity of madness to communicate truth in our culture.

Foucault nuanced, indeed walked back on these claims in his later work. He does this somewhat obliquely as he often did when revising his earlier theories. In this case, he attributes his previously held ideas to the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers. In a discussion with Tadashi Shimizu and Moriaki Watanabe originally published in Japanese in 1970, he distinguishes his analysis of madness from those of early psychologists Pierre Janet and Théodule-Armand Ribot and in particular from Jaspers, who was still alive at the time of the 1961 interview. Jaspers, he says, discovered what he saw as “the secret code of existence”: “a certain kind of supreme experience” which could only be attained when human existence was threatened by madness. This experience could be found in the work of “Hölderlin, Van Gogh, Artaud and Strindberg”. Foucault then hastens to add: “But my object is totally different”. He explains that the difference lies in his adoption of a strictly historical approach. [2]

A fundamental question in Foucault’s work and one that he continually worked on refining was the question of how truth becomes apparent in and through history. He clearly became aware that proposing a certain essence of madness that escaped history, a unique experience privileged in the way it accessed and communicated truth, a thing that was sometimes visible and at other times hidden, was at odds with the position that truth is embedded and revealed through the general historical process. No one group has privileged access – much as certain far less marginalised groups and individuals would like to claim that they do, using such claims as a basis to exercise power. Foucault of course, examined these mechanisms of knowledge and power at length in his work.

Likewise, there are no periods of history when truth is unilaterally silenced and absent. But again, to add another qualification, this does not mean that truth is wholly contained by history, simply, that there is no way for humans to step outside their existence in history, to access it in another supposedly purer, more fixed form. This inability is not the result of a “fall from grace” either. Following the historian of science Georges Canguilhem, Foucault remarks:

The fact that man lives in a conceptually structured environment does not prove that he has turned away from life, or that a historical drama has separated him from it – just that he lives in a certain way, that he has a relationship with his environment such that he has no set point of view toward it, that he is mobile on an undefined or a rather broadly defined territory, that he has to move around to gather information, that he has to move things relative to one another in order to make them useful. Forming concepts is a way of living not a way of killing life. [3]

This brief interview in the context of Foucault’s later work is a demonstration of his own movement around the territory.

References and notes

[1] The painting by Van Gogh included in this post, demonstrates Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints, in particular those of Hiroshige. These prints had a profound impact on his work. There have been a few exhibitions in recent years which have placed the work of these two artists side by side. For example, a remarkable exhibition at the Pinacothèque in Paris in 2012 which I had the good fortune to attend, and a more recent one in Amersterdam which also very successfully toured Japan. In another instance of the reciprocation of this original cross-cultural exchange, one can refer to a segment in Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams, which sees a young man magically transported into the gloriously coloured and textured world of Van Gogh’s paintings in a Paris museum.

[2] Michel Foucault, Folie, litérature, société. Entretien avec T. Shimizu et M. Watanabe, 1970, in Dits et Ecrits, vol II, Gallimard, 1994, p. 108. Item #82.

[3] Michel Foucault, Life, Experience and Science, in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Volume Two. J. D. Faubion. (Ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Allen Lane, Penguin. Dits et Ecrits, nos. #219, #361. For further commentary on this passage see Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault, London: Sage, 2005, p. 57.

This post was drafted with fountain pen and ink. This is the fabulously sparkly Benu 2024 Christmas Astrogem, a special edition limited to 500 numbered pens. Benu is a company based in Armenia, originally founded in Moscow. The chief designer has a background in jewellery and art restoration. This time I am using a Jacques Herbin 1670 Violet impérial ink with gold shimmer. This site reviews the ink.

Review: Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques (Radio Interviews) 1961-1983

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

February 10, 2025

Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024

I was delighted to see the publication of Foucault’s radio interviews in October 2024. Most of this material has not been readily available outside of archives until now. The editor, Henri-Paul Fruchaud is well-known for his extensive and meticulous editorial work on posthumous publications by Foucault and this volume adds to his achievements.

It is a monumental work spanning some 933 pages with transcriptions of 63 radio broadcasts made by Foucault between 1961 and 1983, the bulk of material being from the 1960s and early 1970s. Fruchaud notes some exclusions: television appearances as well as radio broadcasts made outside France and one item already included in the Dits et Ecrits collection. In radio programs made up of separate sections, only Foucault’s contribution has been retained. Amongst the appendices there is a brief timeline of Foucault’s life and career to help readers situate the various radio programs as well as a note from Agnès Chauveau, Director of the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), France’s national archive of audiovisual material.

Even if this material was not originally intended for print publication and Foucault himself probably expected it to be ephemeral, what is clear is that he had a remarkable ability to produce cogent thought and argument in his spoken work and conversations. He often clarified and simplified ideas that were not easy to access in his formal written work. He was aware of this of course, remarking somewhat ironically elsewhere that people preferred reading his interviews as they saw them as a shortcut to understanding the detailed and careful argumentation of his books.

The content of the broadcasts covers Foucault’s books, debates and commentary on various current events as well as the social, cultural and intellectual concerns of his day. One finds unexpected material such as a 1982 round table on Roman gladiators with notable historians Paul Veyne, Jacques Le Goff and archaeologist historian Christian Goudineau. There’s some mild intellectual ribbing from the historians about Foucault’s presence in the forum which he goes along with happily but briefly, before making a more serious contribution.

Other surprising material includes a seven part series broadcast in 1963 titled ‘Pain and Suffering’. This series consists of a variety of interviews with the general public and ‘people in the street’ and various experts in medicine, sociology and anthropology – all with commentary by Foucault. The second in the series includes an interview with Gilles Deleuze. The interviews and commentary are interspersed with literary readings (Dante) and literature from the medical and social sciences.

It’s not clear from the transcripts if Foucault conducted the interviews with members of the public himself – I am assuming this to be the case. It would be interesting to know the background to the series. Was Foucault invited to do it? Did he propose it himself to Radio France III? In any case, it is clear that a considerable amount of work and thought went into developing the program.

In the series, we see a concern that emerges in much of Foucault’s work: a concern for the suffering and experiences of those without a voice. In the first program after some introductory illustrative sound clips, Foucault notes: ‘We have just heard voices from the street. People were approached, people who suffer every day. They had nothing to say about that suffering, their suffering except the most impoverished things, those closest to silence’ (p. 237). The first broadcast asks what pain is, the second how it is treated, then additional programs go on to look at everyday suffering, suffering in the workplace – and here we find interviews and commentary on unsafe workplaces with serious impacts on the health and well-being of the workers. After that, the discussion moves on to the hospital, then childbirth. Foucault begins the latter program stating: “Pain-free childbirth is probably one of the greatest mythological experiences of the post war period.” (p. 305). The last in the series deals with pain in childhood and old age.

Beyond these brief examples, there is much more to discover in this collection – including useful reiterations and reformulations of ideas well-known from the rest of his work. It also bears witness to the enormous scope of Foucault’s erudition and curiosity. Given its length, it may be some time before we see this work translated into English and other languages, but I’ve no doubt negotiations are already in train to bring Foucault’s words to non-French speaking audiences.

The book is available both as an ebook and in hard copy. At a purely physical and material level, in hard copy the book is a fine production with large pages and a very readable well-spaced font with an attractive amount of white space. There are decent left and right margins. The book is nicely bound and opens without effort and stays open. In a world of cost cutting when it comes to books in the humanities it is a pleasure to see such a good production.

To conclude with a final remark from Foucault: ‘I am fighting against the presumption that words are mere wind, that they don’t exist or have almost no substance, that words are just a kind of foam on the ocean of history or again, nothing but the transitory, fragile, precarious and immediately erased reflection of things – things are serious and solid and not just words. What I want to show is people are doing something when they speak.’ (p. 468)

This collection makes a solid contribution to the material body of Foucault’s work in all its diversity and gives a more substantial existence to what could have remained as the fragile, ephemeral and less readily accessible words of a radio archive.

Preliminary reviews and commentary on les Entretiens radiophoniques

It is too early as yet for extended commentary on this new volume, but the items below may be of interest.

French newspapers. Paywall protected

Le canard enchainé, 9 novembre 2024

William Bourton, in Le Soir, 20 novembre 2024.

Roger-Pol Droit in Le Monde, 21 novembre 2024.

Patrice Maniglier in Libération, 9 janvier 2025

Other French magazines

Hicham-Stéphane Afeissa in Non fiction, 23 octobre 2024

Jean-Marie Durand in Les Inrockuptibles, 30 Octobre 2025

Martin Duru in Philosophie Magazine, 22 octobre 2024

Essay review in Norwegian
Joakim Slinning Lange, “Stemmen som fortsetter etter døden (om Henri-Paul Fruchaud (red.), Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983). Agora. Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon, nr. 1-2, 2025 “Judith Butler”, 265-89
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18261/agora.43.1-2.12

This blog post was drafted with pen and paper. For a history of Jacques Herbin wax and inks, originally founded in 1670 see here. Kyanite du Népal has a beautiful silver shimmer which is hard to photograph. The fabulously named Visconti Comedia inferno (brown with shimmering red swirls and highlights) is also difficult to capture here. The Visconti site provides better photographs.

Isaac Asimov on AI and scholarly writing

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

February 7, 2025

There are a hundred contacts between a man and his work at every stage of the game – and the contact itself is pleasurable and repays a man for the work he puts into his creation more than anything else could … Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all … Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and cross-checking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only – the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next! I want to save the future generations of the world of scholarship from such a final hell.

Asimov, I. 1957. “Galley Slave.” Galaxy Science Fiction 15 (1): 315–348.

This fabulous quotation heads an open access article by Maria Gretky and Gideon Dishon.

Gretzky, M., & Dishon, G. (2025). Algorithmic-authors in academia: blurring the boundaries of human and machine knowledge production. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–14.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2025.2452196

Fountain pens: Sailor Oita Made Wancher Japan Red – Japan Blue Series

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

October 26, 2024

One year on and I am still just as enthusiastic about my newly acquired fountain pen hobby. The almost infinite material configurations of pen, ink and paper make writing a thoroughly enjoyable and aesthetic experience, more subtle and more embodied than the combination of keyboard and screen.

I have recently discovered further information about the Sailor Oita Made Wancher Japan Red from the Japan Blue Series, 21K gold nib pen I mentioned in an earlier post. The pen is a lovely combination of creative technology, art, expertise and the contemporary transformation of longstanding cultural traditions. I have copied this information below:

A few extracts from the Oita Made site, translation from Japanese courtesy of Google Translate:

“What if we could dye metal with indigo, a traditional Japanese dye…?” A casual comment from an employee at Nagao Seisakusho in Saiki City started a project aimed at trying something that was the first of its kind in Japan. Nagao Seisakusho is a manufacturing company that specializes in precision sheet metal processing. In addition to manufacturing parts for semiconductor and liquid crystal manufacturing equipment and railroad cars, the company also manufactures and processes a large number of custom-made products to meet customer needs. […] They decided to tackle the task of “coloring metal with natural indigo,” which was previously thought to be almost impossible.
[…]

Oita Made met Nagao Seisakusho shortly after establishing its own method for mass production. The moment they saw the beautiful metal dyed in indigo, they thought of developing a product using it. If anything, they wanted an item that they could carry around with them at all times and feel close to Japan’s excellent technology and tradition. What’s more, it should bring a special sense of exhilaration just by holding it… Thus began the planning and development of a high-quality fountain pen dyed with natural indigo.

For the production of Japan’s first fountain pen, Wancher, a company in Oita Prefecture that manufactures and sells its own brand of stationery, provided development support, while Sailor Fountain Pen, one of Japan’s leading stationery manufacturers, handled the manufacturing. Sailor Fountain Pen, whose main factory is in Kure City, Hiroshima Prefecture, is a long-established company that has led the Japanese writing implement industry for over 100 years.

[…]
The surface is decorated with a fine hammered pattern reminiscent of the tsuba (guard) of a Japanese sword, pursuing a Japanese texture.

From the Wancher website (originally in English)

For JAPAN RED, Purple Red is a traditional dye that is much loved throughout Japan’s history. In fact, until now, you can still observe this shade in textiles, preserved in heritage sites such as Horyuji Temple or The Shosoin Repository – The Imperial Household Agency.

My own text (apart from the quotations above) originally written with the Japan Red.

C.S. Lewis on writing

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

March 29, 2024

This quotation from C.S. Lewis has been doing the rounds of both the writers’ and fountain pen communities. I quite like it – even if I find some of Lewis’s other output a bit too unbearably pompous for modern tastes. It appears on the back dust jacket of a recent collection edited by David C. Downing: C. S. Lewis, On Writing (and Writers), A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions, Harper One, 2022.

“Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”

Originally from The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 30 May, 1916

Cactus collectors

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

December 2, 2023

I’m endlessly interested by the surprising enthusiasms people engage in and the lengths they will go to pursue them. This book on cactus collectors looks like a fascinating read. I’ve added it to my to read list.

Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters. Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade, Minnesota University Press, 2023

Jared Margulies In Conversation With Samantha Walton. Podcast, 14 November 2023

An exploration of the explosive illegal trade in succulents and the passion that drives it.

Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, Jared D. Margulies explores the mystery of why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade—even at the risk of driving some species to extinction. A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.

Cacti and succulents are phenomenally popular worldwide among plant enthusiasts, despite being among the world’s most threatened species. The fervor driving the illegal trade in succulents might also be driving some species to extinction. Delving into the strange world of succulent collecting, The Cactus Hunters takes us to the heart of this conundrum: the mystery of how and why ardent lovers of these plants engage in their illicit trade. This is a world of alluring desires, where collectors and conservationists alike are animated by passions that at times exceed the limits of law.

What inspires the desire for a plant? What kind of satisfaction does it promise? The answer, Jared D. Margulies suspects, might be traced through the roots and workings of the illegal succulent trade—an exploration that traverses the fields of botany and criminology, political ecology and human geography, and psychoanalysis. His globe-spanning inquiry leads Margulies from a spectacular series of succulent heists on a small island off the coast of Mexico to California law enforcement agents infiltrating a smuggling ring in South Korea, from scientists racing to discover new and rare species before poachers find them to a notorious Czech “cacto-explorer” who helped turn a landlocked European country into the epicenter of the illegal succulent trade.

A heady blend of international intrigue, social theory, botanical lore, and ecological study, The Cactus Hunters offers complex insight into species extinction, conservation, and more-than-human care.

Jared D. Margulies is assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. His work has been published in leading academic journals across the fields of social, cultural, and political geography; political ecology; the conservation social sciences; and environmental humanities.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this reference

Fountain pens: a new hobby

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

November 29, 2023

Recently, I have been taking a deep dive into the surprisingly flourishing global subculture of fountain pens. I was introduced to fountain pens at school and in 1980 settled on a Targa by Sheaffer in Brushed Stainless Steel with a steel nib (model 1001) powered by Parker Quink black ink. I have been writing with this combination ever since.

It is only recently I have discovered fountain pens have revived with an absolute cornucopia of pen, ink and paper choices out there. Another new realisation: one can actually own more than one “good pen” (biros, rollerballs, felt tips etc don’t count).

With these realisations in hand, I launched out and ordered a Sailor Oita Made Japan Red – Japan Blue Series from Japan. This is built on a Sailor Professional Gear base. Sailor, I have learned, is a top end Japanese pen brand with an interesting history. The company was founded in 1911 in Japan by the engineer Kyugoro Sakata who was inspired by an English fountain pen shown to him by a visiting sailor.

I inked up my new arrival today with a matching red ink – one of a set of sample inks I ordered online. The pen is an absolute pleasure to write with. It’s actually better than my now ancient Sheaffer Targa.

It’s always a risk buying online without seeing or testing – even if a product has a really good reputation – so that’s a relief!

My next purchase will be a relatively cheap pen that apparently works well with shimmer and sheen inks which can potentially clog pens. TWSBI – a Taiwanese brand – is often cited in the fountain pen community as up to the job. At the same time, I will buy a small collection of sheen and shimmer inks and use them just with this dedicated pen. The particular model I have my eye on has a cap and piston knob that glow in the dark. It has to be done!

Reviews of the Japan blue
Review on the fountain pen network Note: the Red version has a 21k gold nib.

This post was composed on a keyboard.

Time in an immobile place

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

November 27, 2023

This post is a reminder to myself to get hold of and read Grafton Tanner’s new book. I don’t know if he refers to Foucault, but I can’t help but think of Foucault’s notions of heterotopia when I read the book description.

…the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general
archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms,
all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside
of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this
way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an
immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity (Foucault,
1967/1998).

Michel Foucault, Of other spaces, Trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Spring 1986. (Original work published 1967), p.26

Book details below. And also a link to an interesting discussion with the author
Nostalgia’s Empire: A conversation with Grafton Tanner and Johny Pitts, Public Books, 6 August 2023

Grafton Tanner, Foreverism, Polity, November 2023

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

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