III
The phenomena of psychotic signification has compelled many to take madness as a methodological idiom of sorts with which to propose discursive recalibrations against certain forms of symbolic alienation. The logic is as follows: if language is constitutive of an experience (politically, socially, culturally) and if that experience is alienating in some way (politically, socially, culturally), then the example of psychotic symbolic resistance – at least theoretically – sheds light on different paradigmatic possibilities and propositionally suggests a modality of subversion against hegemonic systems of power (from the macro to the micro-political).
This is of course a key component in anti-psychiatric discourse.5 Language – especially in the broadly Structurailist / Lacanian iterations of French anti-psychiatry, but also in the work of R.D. Laing and David Cooper – standing as a key tool for thinking with madness against the constructive nature of the symbolic order.6
5 I refer specifically to the emergence in the 60s of a number of thinkers, practitioners and groups who might broadly be determined to be ‘anti-psychiatric’; that is wiling to active challenge some of the most fundamental assumptions and practices made around mental health in order to propose new and alternative modes of operation. These proposition were most often broadly against any simplistically pejorative understanding of ‘madness’ In this sense the work of Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing, David Cooper, Jaques Lacan, Felix Guattari, Jean Oury, Thomas Szasz and Franco Basaglia is exemplary.
6 In order that we understand what is being suggested by this restitution of madness, and so that we might immediately avoid expected critiques of romanticization we must however immediately remind ourselves of the words with which David Cooper opens his book The Language of Madness (1978): “The madness about which I’m writing is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’ or some other label invented by the specialized psycho-social police agents of the final stages of capitalist society. So when I use the word ‘madman’ I’m not referring to a special race of people, but the madman in me is addressing the madman in you in the hope that the former madman speaks clearly or loudly enough for the latter to hear. (Cooper 1978, 19)”
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