Sure sign of madness and civilization ...

[Dave Monroe]

>From Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans.
A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975) ...

"Furthermore, the prestige of the sciences of life in
the nineteenth century [...] is linked originally not
with the comprehensive, transferable character of
biological concepts, but, rather, with the fact that
these concepts were arranged in a space whose profound
structure responded to the healthy/morbid opposition. 
When one spoke of the life of groups and societies, of
the life of the race, or even of the 'psychological
life,' one did not think first of the internal
structure of the organized being but of the medical
bipolarity of the normal and the pathological. 
Consciousness live beacuse it can be altered, maimed,
diverted from its course, paralysed; societies live
because there are sick declining societies, and
healthy expanding ones." (p. 35; my ellipses)

... cited in Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies:
The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989), pp. 4-5.  See also
Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological,
trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone, 1989) ...


--- Jane Sweet O' Flaherty <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
wrote:
> 
>  "We define each other."





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