The Monarchy of Madness
The king is the first madman. The leviathan walking street bears the king’s mark. All monsters are descendants of tyrants, sovereigns, and, most importantly, a power turned malignant. Throughout these histories of aberrance, going astray always carries with it an immediate political exile. The abnormal is deemed apolitical, beyond the bounds of politics and its Right. One often finds in the medico-juridical discourses of the 19th century attempts at drawing a kind of correspondence between the straying of bodies and the devastation of the ground of civil society. As Acid Horizon claims in Anti-Oculus, in “abnormality, there is a thread that runs through to a political assertion of anarchy; and in anarchy, there is a thread that runs through to a medico-juridical assertion of abnormality”. This anarchy of abnormality remains crucial. Power and pathology remain interlinked. But what will be the focus here is a strange thread of resonance connecting the regaled and the restrained.
A genealogy of madness reveals that its moral treatment depends on a false claim of power; it is this symptom—this crisis in the court of reason—that will be the point of attack. Unreason refuses the sovereignty of reason in the classical age, and it is madness that manifests in the image of its usurpation. Robert Chapman, a disability and neurodiversity scholar, claims to have stumbled upon a “hitherto unnamed” notion: “Mad supremacy.” They warn that there is a subterranean constituency of “Mad pride” that attests that “Madness is not really insanity” (Chapman 2024). Even more dangerous to our liberal order is that the self-acclaimed superior Mad person claims to have a “a positive set of traits” (Chapman 2024). Even further, Chapman tells their readers to be weary, as we have not yet uncovered “how widespread Mad supremacy is.” Unfortunately for Chapman, they have neither discovered nor unraveled some obscure danger from which society must be defended. Chapman is reiterating the classical definition of madness. The supposed self-asserted supremacy Chapman speaks of is, in fact, a constitutive element of the production of the dangerous individual. This formation is one that tells us that not all tyrants and criminals are Mad, but that all Mad people are potential tyrants and criminals. It is comments and assertions from academic experts that continue to contribute to “everyday discourses that kill” (Foucault 2003b, 7). Madness, from the classical age to the liberation of Bicetre, is found where power is grotesque. It is found where it elides the sovereign covenant, it falsifies a mandate from heaven, and proclaims a unitary kingdom. In madness one finds both the shame of an unreason brought to social light, and an audaciousness to make a claim that comes from outside the medical gaze. Madness, be it that of King George III or of a failed regicide, is seated in a false throne. Such dangerous individuals are usurpers of our sovereign rationality.
One such false claimant can be found in the ultimate chapter of Francois Leuret’s treatise published in 1840, Traitement moral de la folie. Michel Foucault finds this description of Leuret’s royal patient to be of particular importance in the development of psychiatric treatment.
Monsieur Dupre believed himself to be Napoleon. Beyond taking on these stressful imperial responsibilities, Leuret stresses to his epigones and readers that Dupre believed himself to be “sexually superior to all humanity,” and that within every assertion Dupre makes there is “a sort of sovereignty” (Foucault 2003, 147). Leuret uses Dupre’s case as a basis to expound upon the first principle of psychiatric moral treatment: a complete imbalance of power. Dupre’s kingdom must be turned to ruins. This imbalance of power is the very first thing that must be communicated to any new patient. Philippe Pinel, the mythologized liberator of Bicetre, concurs: the psychiatrist, who is the sole governor of the asylum, must “march up” to the “madman.” And they must do so “with an intrepid air.” In this dethroning, the assistants must engage in a tactical assault and “surround the maniac” so that he “finds himself in instant and unexpected confinement” (Pinel 2017). The response to madness must prioritize this disempowerment. This “ceremony is continued with more or less variation” until the patient’s “lunatic embellishments” cease. However, for the treatment to function, both in the case of Pinel and Leuret, this power imbalance must remain the definitive experience within these walls of confinement.
In order to free Monsieur Dupre from his delusion of grandeur, that he is the most “virile” patient in the clinic, Leuret violently shakes him and throws him around his quarters one afternoon. However, this display of physical strength on the part of the psychiatrist leaves Dupre unconvinced. That evening, Leuret slips grains of calomel into his dinner, causing Dupre to suffer violent diarrhea through the night. The next morning the psychiatrist victoriously attests that this virile and omnipotent emperor “is so afraid at night that it has given him the runs!” (Foucault 2003, 149). This ritualized and perpetually instantiated imbalance of power remains crucial to psychiatric treatment, but it finds its roots in the false regality of those who are to be treated.
The monarchy of madness attests to the impropriety of one’s account of oneself and one’s place in the social order. Pinel writes of this alienation in a completely congruent manner to Leuret. The admittee has come to “fancy himself as a deity” or an “emperor” and for this reason the absolute authority of the psychiatrist must be initially established and continually maintained (Pinel 2017). When Leuret heard his patient repeat, “I do not think I am mad”, an ice-cold shower would fall upon Dupre’s head. He would be showered repeatedly until he would proclaim the truth and give an acceptable account of his life: “all of it is madness”. This ritual of power imbalance is later pursued by Etienne Esquirol, who, when faced with a patient who claimed he was “the ‘Emperor of the World’”, would give him a “bath” (Esquirol 2017). Eventually, when faced with “the immediate prospect of a bath”, his “regal dignity would forsake him, and he was most willing to admit that he had never been, nor was he at the time […] Emperor of the World.”
Madness rips the patient from the social fabric, but beyond that it lends the patient a repugnant face, one of political pretension and power they do not rightfully possess. They falsely reign supreme. This claim of supremacy, of absolute sovereignty, runs so deep in the history of madness, that one need look no further than Descartes’ first meditation to find it. When radically excluding the possibility of his own madness, he concludes it is impossible precisely because he does not claim authority like those who are so deeply impaired:
On what grounds could one deny that these hands and this entire body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to the insane, whose brains are impaired by such an unrelenting vapor of black bile that they steadfastly insist that they are kings when they are utter paupers, or that they are arrayed in purple robes when they are naked, or that they have heads made of clay, or that they are gourds, or that they are made of glass. But such people are mad, and I would appear no less mad, were I to take their behavior as an example for myself.
(Descartes 1993, 14).
Reason obeys, the mad monsters are beyond the law – they decide its expanse, and its exceptions.
The lines between monstrosity, madness, and eventually (though much later) abnormality move and fade throughout the early to late modern era. While these figures of the madman, the monster, and the abnormal all shift around, one strange element of their social danger remains: the attestation of sovereignty or supremacy. And this danger must be quelled with a complete imbalance within the walls of the institution. In the twentieth century, Erving Goffman would call the asylum a “total institution,” where a patient is “institutionalized” and completely subordinated by a specific and intentional power imbalance (Goffman 1961,19-42). This term, institutionalization, this process of the disciplinary-control society that we consider so fundamental, cascades from the great fear of the madman’s claimed sovereignty, his false supremacy. This audacity of abnormality, this fear of grotesque unwarranted power, is what links the chains in the basement of Bicetre to the restraints at King’s Park. This supremacy of the Mad is constituent to both the birth and continuance of carceral medicine.
The King, The Cannibal, and the Anarchist
Foucault’s 1975 lectures Abnormal spend a considerable amount of time tethering abnormality, madness, and monstrosity to politics. But there is often a missed element in Foucault’s account of psychiatry in these lectures. Foucault describes the arrival of expert psychiatric opinion as a crucial moment in not just the history of criminal sciences, juridical procedure, and judicial ruling, but in the epistemic and pathological composition of madness and how it is interpreted. Guilt takes on a new meaning. If one of the goals of the disciplinary society is to close the gap between transgression and punishment, so that the two are ultimately always conceived of concomitantly, the same must be said of act and behavior. A transgression no longer testifies to simply a necessary corresponding punishment, but to the composition of the individual who engaged in that transgression. Even before Julius Bahnsen formalized the psychological discipline of “characterology” or the Jungians set down their theory of archetypes, Europe saw an explosion of psychiatric opinions that formed a discourse around the criminal typification of ways of being. The birth of criminal psychology, of expert psychiatric opinion, finds its nascent point in the discourses of the 19th century. Expert psychiatric opinion provides juridical procedure with a supplemental power. Expert psychiatric opinion “tries to establish the antecedents below the threshold, as it were, of the crime” (Foucault 2003b, 19). Foucault quotes a psychiatric opinion from a 1960 that resulted in an execution which cite a series of “misdeeds”, but not codified legal infractions. The executed man possessed a “desire to surprise” and that from a “very young” age “he exhibited a taste for domination.” He was “already showing off revolvers” to his schoolmates and his “passion for gambling was “evident at a young age.” This little tyrant “already resembles his crime before he has committed it” (Foucault 2003b, 19). Foucault focuses on the aspect of behavioral analyses that indicate the supposed inevitability of these legal infractions. The point of Foucault’s journey through expert psychiatric opinion in January of 1975 is to prove a double pointed relation between psychiatry and law. Simply put, there is an interdependency and competition between psychiatry and the juridical apparatuses. An interdependency exists at the level of court orders for confinement from a judge and enforcement from police, and the necessity for expert psychiatric opinion to secure swift conviction. What this analysis must focus on is the relation between an image of power, its articulated or potential abuse, and abnormality. The pathologized criminal and the tyrant bear and resemblance. The entire punitive apparatus relies on this isomorphism. The figure of the tyrant becomes pathologized in the modern age, they are sick, the are Mad, they are physiologically predisposed to obstinance and therefore predisposed to taking and abusing power. It is worth taking a look at a few vignettes of this grotesque power.
The question of what form the trial of King Louis XVI should take was quite juridically complicated. A significant number of Jacobins felt that he should not be subject to the benefits of a trial and the penalty for traitors, because he never subscribed to the social Louis XVI “never recognized the existence of the social body and only ever applied his power by ignoring its existence”. “The king was the absolute enemy and should be regarded as an enemy by the entire social body. He therefore had to be crushed as one crushes an enemy or a monster” (Foucault 2003b, 95). This claim of extrajudicial existence, in the state of exception, now places the king in the zone of exception – as homo sacer. “Anyone had the right to kill the king, even without the general consent of others” (Foucault 2003b, 96). This question of where the abnormal are situated in relation to the law and its application will take on a new urgency in 19th century psychiatry and psychology.
When Esquirol and Cesare Lombroso each articulate a scientific image of the criminal, they describe them as an “everyday monster” (Foucault 2003b, 96). Lombroso, a eugenicist founder of criminology, sought to reform criminal punishment through a description of the “born criminal.” This born criminal is certainly not guilty of being born in opposition too the law, but this abnormal individual presents a series of dangers. For example “born criminals” and the “morally insane” have a unique relation to impulse. “That which in ordinary individuals is only an eccentric and fugitive suggestion vanishing as soon as it arises, in the case of abnormal subjects is rapidly translated into action, which, although unconscious, is not the less dangerous” (Lombroso 1911, 36). Furthermore, these born criminals have a propensity for glamor in their transgressions. “One of the most frequent causes of modern crime is the desire to gratify personal vanity and to become notorious” (Lombroso 1911, 36). Abnormality, for Lombroso, always runs the risk of desires of immodest admiration. But for Lombroso, this danger of “unbalanced minds” extends to revolutionary history. Lombroso believed this new criminal science could “provide us with a way of distinguishing the genuine, fruitful, and useful revolution from the always sterile rot of revolt” (Foucault 2003b, 154). The tyrannical Mad king and the anarchist in revolt share this trait, an abnormality that places them in a zone of exception. “Men of genius” seek revolution, insurrection is for the audacious sterile mass in revolt:
The army of progress is recruited from all ranks and conditions—men of genius, intellectual spirits […] Lunatics, enthusiastic propogandists of the new ideas, which the spread with all the impetuous ardor characteristic of unbalanced minds; criminals, the natural enemies of order, who flock to the standard of revolt and bring with it their special gifts; audacity and contempt of death. These latter types accomplish the work of destruction.
Lombroso 1911, 297
The problem for Lombroso is that the history of revolution is lined with saints who soar “high above the mass of mankind” and “lunatics, unbalanced individuals,” who seek insurrection and a flight from governmental reason. Of course, there are those who engage in the same such distinctive differentiating maneuvers. The history of the vanquished is accompanied by historiological-pathologists who render their fate an inevitability. Our challenge now is not to contest these accounts but understand what made them possible. Perhaps this is what Foucault meant when he spoke of the “bio-history” that accompanies biopolitics. It is an account of a population that is accompanied by a particular history of proper comportments, and improper criminals, tyrants, and degenerates. It is this history, and this attestation of a possibly “widespread” socio-political danger, that we must take up critically (Chapman 2024). It is, and will continue to be, a discourse that kills.
The “Hitherto unnamed” Superiority
It is the unnamed which always operates with the most verbosity. In their piece on “Mad supremacy,” Chapman claims to have stumbled upon a unique phenomenon that no one has yet spoken of. The assertion within madness of its own superiority. But as we have seen, this could not be further from the truth. Throughout the history of madness, one encounters discourses that single out the dangers of Mad people on account of a pathologized superiority. Chapman singles out the work of Justin Garson, who attempts to erect (without much success) a complete historical-pathological boundary between notions of “idiocy” and madness”. Garson supposedly seeks to articulate a notion of madness that recognizes it as “constituted” by reason. Furthermore, Garson wants to distance madness from “idiocy”. Garson seeks to dispense with idiocy ultimately to disconnect the history of madness from idiocy. His entire argument relies on upholding a particular mode of pathological reasoning that is fundamental to the exact same mode of policing that has produced our ableist modernity.
This is not what Chapman criticizes, however. Chapman’s target is uniquely the danger in representing madness outside of a given set of pathological coordinates.
Ultimately Chapman and Garson are two sides of the same pathological coin. Chapman is our realist physiologist. They contend that Mad people, under the ice shower of psychiatric power, accept their pathologization and treat it as a constituent point of political organizing. Garson is simply imposing the logic of extension. Garson’s position accepts pathologization as a principle of differentiating and disciplining bodies but wants to make an exceptional claim for madness on account of its representation in Late Modernity as being constituted by reason. This is historically questionable.
The problem, however, is that Chapman ultimately does not criticize the ableist foundations of these assertions. Instead, Chapman raises the walls of the apparatus of disability and claims the truth of the social model of impairment. Chapman’s project ultimately circulates and depends on the “pathological paradigm” they attempt to escape. Ultimately the way Chapman seeks to frame the neurodiversity is through a realism that corresponds directly to the logic of the norm. In Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, Chapman claims to have evaded the prevailing “pathological paradigm” through an account of neurodiversity that sees it as something akin to “biodiversity.” It is a biodiversity of humanity and its neurological processes. All of these dispositions contribute to the logic of the norm. The norm is a series of distributions, the norm itself remains empty. Resisting normality by valorizing the coordinates it imposes on a population is not resistance, it is discipline. One thing should be made clear; this is not the same as the transgressive assertion where a subjugated population mocks the supposed dangers they present, like Hocquenghem and FHAR replying to the accusation of being “parasites”:
All revolutionaries will have to become parasites of society, and more and more irresponsibly at that, or they will still be the knights of some morality or another. Our energy is devoted to the destruction of the animal that feeds us, and this remains true for those of us who inevitably feed it in return.
Hocquenghem 2009, 49
What Chapman is arguing is quite noticeably different; it is to accept the conditions of the distribution, but to abandon the norm. It is a position that uncritically accepts the position that the British Social Model (BSM) of disability provides: that disability is a social manifestation within a given political situation that is caused by an underlying, prediscursive, impairment. For the proponent of the BSM and the “disability realist”, disability is on the side of ideological illusions about utility and the capitalist mode of production and impairment is on the side of a stagnant reality of the body. Foucault warns us not to do the same with the sex/sexuality distinction. “We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas” (Foucault 1978, 124). It is the system of knowledge production that puts in place these distributions of bodies that must be analyzed. To take up a position of revolt on the exact principles of the organization of the social order is to concede before the barricade is even erected. Beyond this is a seriously dangerous assertion about the “surplus class”. That the “surplus” must organize “as surplus”:
[A]n integrated surplus class must organize as surplus alongside the workers of the world, and workers must orient their theory and praxis to include critique of eugenic ideology and the liberation of the surplus.
Chapman 2023, 203
This is a dangerous politics of subjectivation that attempts to take the epistemic grid of intelligibility and flip it against itself. The “surplus population” is only utterable conceptually once one has conceded to the mode of production which makes it a phenomenon to be managed. What Chapman ultimately presents is a strengthening of ableist modernity by upholding its realism. Mad people must accept their pathology first, then they can speak – and the predicates of their madness will precede them.
It is what Chapman concedes and strategically excludes from their presentation of a disabled politics that must be critically examined. You do not discourse your way out of power, you do not confess your way out of punitive life. What is at stake in our epoch is a danger that lurks in every corner of the history of philosophy: how we render life intelligible.
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References
Chapman, Robert. 2023. “Mad Supremacy.” Critical Neurodiversity. https://criticalneurodiversity.com/2024/02/19/mad-supremacy/
Chapman, Robert. 2023. Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Pluto Press.
Descartes, Rene. 1923. Meditations on First Philosophy. Hackett Edition.
Esquirol, Jean-Etienne. 2017. Mental Maladies; A Treatise on Insanity. Hard Press.
Foucault. 1978. History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Pantheon.
Foucault. 2003. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France. Picador Press.
Foucault. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France. Picador Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.
Lombroso, Cesare. 1911. Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. GP Putnam’s Sons.
Pinel, Phillipe. 2017. A Treatise on Insanity. Hard Press.
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