Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida
Drawing connections between madness, philosophy and autobiography, this book addresses the question of how Nietzsche's madness might have affected his later works. It also explores why continental philosophy after Nietzsche is so fascinated
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A N G E L O S E VA N G E L O U
Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida “A thoughtful examination of madness as a philosophical metaphor, asking how engagement with the autobiographical writings of prominent philosophers— Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida—might change the way we read their respective theories of conscience, lucidity, accountability and doubt.” —Ted Hiebert, Associate Professor, University of Washington Bothell, USA “Angelos Evangelou’s book is a remarkably bold attempt to stage a confrontation between two conceptions of the relation between philosophy and madness: Michel Foucault’s, on the one hand, and Jacques Derrida’s and Georges Bataille’s, on the other. It attempts to rethink Foucault’s notion of an exclusion of madness from reason and from philosophy in the Classical age, and it does so by demonstrating the extent to which philosophy need not be rigorously separated from the autobiography of the philosopher—that philosophy, as well as being a self-contained work without external conditioning and presupposition, is also a witting or unwitting form of autobiography. The intrusion of the philosopher’s life (or bios) into the philosophical ‘work’ (œuvre) introduces a fissure within logos itself, which opens reason to the inclusion of madness at its very heart. The most exemplary philosophical madness is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, but, so it is argued, the philosopher himself remained unable fully to reflect upon this madness and to capture it in a work, his corpus rather disintegrating with the onset of insanity. In Nietzsche’s wake, Foucault, our most renowned historian of madness, is argued also to resist including his own bios in a philosophical logos, and is hence led to assume that literature and the absence of work, rather than philosophy and the production of a work provide the most adequate response which writing can make to madness. Confronting Foucault’s approach to madness and philosophy with that of Bataille and Derrida, this exceptional text elaborates with exemplary clarity the thesis that the latter’s philosophical response to madness provides us with the model of an ethical relation to madness which Foucault ultimately does not. An extremely important book for anyone with an interest in the relation between philosophy, work, life, and insanity.” —Michael Lewis, Teaching Fellow in Philosophy, Newcastle University, UK
Angelos Evangelou
Philosophizing Madness from Nietzsche to Derrida
Angelos Evangelou Department of Comparative Literature University of Kent Canterbury, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-57092-1 ISBN 978-3-319-57093-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57093-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938541 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other
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