Madness and Civilization shares a number of similarities in method and argument with Foucault’s vastly influential study a decade later, History of Sexuality. In both histories, Foucault looks at discourse to track how a particular experience is understood in Western societies, mental illness in the first book and sexuality in the latter. And in both books, the story he tells is about the formation of identities that get to the “soul” of a person. So, madness starts to look like the essence of the “mad person,” just as sexuality starts to look like the essence of the “homosexual.”
At the same time, there are a few differences between the books. For one, by the time Foucault was writing History of Sexuality, he seems to have rejected some of his arguments in Madness. For instance, in another book, Archaeology of Knowledge from 1969, Foucault wrote about his disinterest in the “scarcely articulated experience,” noting, “[t]his is written against an explicit theme of my book [Madness]” (52n1).
Nonetheless, recent academics have invited a re-assessment of Foucault’s work by privileging History of Madness over History of Sexuality. A key to this is the relation between acts and identities. In History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that a gay identity arose in the late 19th century, converting mere homosexual behavior into a homosexual “soul.” Before this period, men might have had sex with men, but it did not seem like a permanent identity or essence of one’s self. In Mad for Foucault, Lynne Huffer argues that Madness gives a different perspective, showing: “Foucault’s story is not about an absolute historical shift from sexuality as acts to sexuality as identities, but rather is about the internalization of bourgeois morality which produces, eventually, the ‘fable’ of an inner psyche, soul, or conscience” (77). Madness also “describes how that internalization of bourgeois morality occurs, from the moment of the great confinement to its culmination in the creation of the Freudian unconscious” (72).
In a somewhat more nuanced reading from which Huffer draws, Didier Eribon acknowledges some of the contradictions between Sexuality and Madness and suggests Foucault himself was seeking a synthesis in the years before his death. In particular, Eribon notes that the two different histories of marginalized identity presented by the two works entail two different political projects, both of which might be useful. Madness, Eribon claims:
gives us an analysis cast in the terms of prohibition and repression [and Foucault’s project] is to make audible the speech of those who had been reduced to silence. In [Sexuality], he describes the act of speech as one of the constitutive elements of an apparatus of power that incites individuals to speak. It is easy to imagine how different the political perspectives implied by these two analyses would be. Yet I have the impression that in his interviews from the 1980s Foucault was trying to integrate these two positions and to go beyond them through the idea of an “aesthetics of existence” that would involve the creation of new subjectivities. (Insult 9)
It is here that we might see some similarities between the two books. In both cases, Foucault’s enduring interest is breaking out of systems of social norms, what Huffer calls “bourgeois morality,” and this is a power struggle that plays out at the level of individual existence, or the types of meanings people attach to behaviors, lifestyles, and identities.
