THE MANIAC BRAIN ARE ON OR OFF?Madness and Civilization explores two major canonical events in the transition from medieval to modern social structures. The first is the differentiation of criminals, paupers, and the insane. The second is the relationship between the insane and the agency responsible for treating them. However, in typical Foucaultian style the book elliptically skips around these main topics, instead focusing on 18th century nosgraphies between hysteria and mania and melancholia, and the various humoral theories that underlay those now entirely discredited theories. The closing thoughts, the idea that the psychiatrist is essentially a moral shaman, and that madness serves as the dark mirror to enlightment rationality, lack the scholarly hitting power of the Panopticon...... Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.......LIKE VASCUS DA GAMA BAIXA ...Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him .....People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.” ― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled Menuret repeats an observation of Forestier's that clearly shows how an excessive loss of a humor, by drying out the vessels and fibers, may provoke a state of mania; this was the case of a young man who 'having married his wife in the summertime, became maniacal as a result of the excessive intercourse he had with her.

A symbolic unity formed by the languor of the fluids, 


by the darkening of the animal spirits and the shadowy 


twi­light they spread over the images of things,


 by the viscosity of the blood that laboriously 


trickles through the vessels, 



by the thickening of vapors that have 


become blackish, deleterious, 



and acrid, by visceral functions that have be­come 


slow and somehow slimy-this unity, 




more a product of sensibility than of thought or theory,



 gives melancholia its characteristic stamp