РАЖДАНЕТО НА ЛУДОСТТА ОТ ТРИУМФА НА РАЗУМА
THE BIRTH OF INSANITY OUT OF THE TRIUMPH OF REASON

Summary/Abstract: The paper puts in question a predominant and shared position within the debate about insanity between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. It is argued that the opposition “reason - unreason / insanity” could not be viewed as fundamentally determining and even less as primordial to the West- European culture in general, if the latter is actually thought to be structurally present since the beginning of the ninth century. The boundary between reason and insanity could be perceived as determining the boundary between cultural normality and abnormality only if we uncritically extrapolate the status of reason which was actual during the “classical age” of reason up to the middle of the 20th century at most. The gradual autonomization of reason (between 12th and 16th century) actualizes that boundary as a fundament defining culture. Apparently, opposition in question was dominant only in a separate phase of the West-European culture. The significance of insanity and its culturally valid existence grew up along with the escalation of the significance and autonomy of reason as a regulator and / or as a constitutive principle of the “proper order” in society and in the world, reason hunting for absolutism. Insanity was born out of the triumph of reason.

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