2. — Une conscience pratique de la folie.

Here the freeing up is neither the nearly victorious force of dialectic nor its brilliance. It is imposed as a concrete reality because it is given in the existence and mores of a group; but what is more, it is called for as a choice, an inevitable choice, since it is highly necessary to be on this side or the other, in the group or outside the group. Yet this choice is a false choice as only those who are on the inside of the group have the right to designate those who, in being considered as on the outside, are accused of having chosen to be there. The awareness, solely critical conscience, that they have deflected rests on the internal realization that they have chosen another way by which it is justified — becoming at once clear and clouded — in an immediate banishment of debate, doubt. It is not a conscience clouded by its involvement in the difference and undifferentiated sameness of madness and reason; it is an awareness of the difference between madness and reason, that is possible in the homogeneity of the group considered as the arbiter of reason’s normative practice. For being social, normative, heavily relied on from the start, this consciousness of madness is no less dramatic; if it involves the group’s solidarity, it indicates equally the urgency of a shared division.

In this division dies the ever dangerous freedom of dialogue; there remains only the peaceful certainty that it is necessary to reduce madness to silence. It’s an ambiguous realization — untroubled, since it is positive it possesses the truth, but worried about recognizing the confused powers of madness. Against reason, madness appears now as though disarmed; but against order, against that which reason is able to demonstrate about it even in the laws and things of men, it discloses strange powers. It’s this order that the practical awareness of folly feels as threatened, and the division it operates risks its fate. But this risk is limited, falsified even from the start; there is not an actual confrontation, only the uncompensated exercise of an absolute right that the conscience of folly is given from the beginning by being recognized as of the same kind as reason and the group. Ceremony trumps debate; it is not the mishaps of a real struggle which expresses this conscious folly of madness, but only the immemorial rituals of conjuring ghosts. This form of ethical consciousness is at once the most and least historical; it is given at each instant as an immediately defensive reaction, but this defense does nothing but rekindle all the old dread of horror. The modern asylum, at least if one considers the obscure conscience which explains it and forms the basis of its necessity, is not purely of the leper houses’ inheritance. The practical consciousness of madness, which seems to only be defined by the transparence of its teleology, is without a doubt the deepest, the most laden with dramas of old in its simple ceremony.