Madness and Political Philosophy: Beiner on Foucault

Abstract

Beiner's discussion of Foucault is grounded in the effort to “deconstruct” Foucault's mask “as a mere historian” (152). Beiner unpacks Foucault's Panopticon of post-Enlightenment society which, in a dynamic of power/knowledge, crafts the soul in a “regime of surveillance and discipline” that “maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection” (155, 158). Beiner forcefully contends that behind Foucault's language in Discipline and Punish there must be some account of the human being that would prefer to be outside of this seemingly dystopic society—one that is entitled “not to be subject to such a regime of normalization and control” (153). There is something disingenuous, Beiner claims, about Foucault's fidelity to the idea that “his intellectual enterprise [as a historian] requires him to disavow the normative power of his own theorizing” (164). I propose an interpretation that will perhaps rescue Foucault from Beiner's accusation of disingenuousness, and simultaneously establish a kinship between Beiner's lament for political philosophy and Foucault's own. The proposal is that Foucault is a madman.