Guven starts with the disingenuous
suggestion that this book comes too late; "because it arrives after the
event of madness". However, although the event in question, the
philosophical discourse about madness, and its growth and development in the
last three decades, may have started, it is far from finished. It is hard to
agree with the author that the "scholarly curiosity about madness has long
since passed". In point of fact, it seems, not only from this book, but
the increasing use of the construct of the ‘other’ in public discourse, that
such considerations are timely and important.

However, this is not a book for the
academically faint-hearted. It is dense, reflexive, even a little prolix at
times, and not particularly accessible to the general audience. It relies to a
great extent on a prior knowledge of inter-related, not to say in-house debates
within the philosophical community, and while that may not be an issue for
scholars, it could be a deterrent for the interested, but non-specialist
reader.

Nor is it a book about madness as a
clinician might understand it — even one familiar with the tenets of
Foucault’s arguments. It attempts to consider the nature of negativity, which
is in itself a tricky concept. Guven links the two themes of madness and death
together in this way — both are in some way antagonistic to some of the
strongest drives in western philosophy: rationality and life. He traces the
academic debate from Plato through Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger’s critique
of Hegel, Foucault’s extension of the notion of the ‘other’ and Derrida’s
response to Foucault.

Guven draws out this debate to
conclude that there is an essential question of ethics and difference at the
heart of this. He notes Derrida’s assertion that there is always a colonization
within the rational accommodation of the irrational; that there is always, at
the bottom of it all, this in any structure that assimilates the oppositional
voice rather than being open to it and recognizing its legitimacy.

Guven disagrees with Plato that madness and death
should be excluded from philosophy (because of their negativity), and
appropriately argues that they are absolutely central, first because of their
oppositional nature (that is to say that you cannot really fully discuss a
concept without a consideration of it opposite) and secondly because of their
pertinence to the deconstructive analysis that interrogates rationality. These
seem to be of great import at the moment.

In conclusion, it has to be said
that this book, while undoubtedly approaching a significant and meaningful
question, will only reach a limited audience. It is unlikely to affect
clinicians directly, and the question of what may be seen, philosophically
speaking, as madness as a construct of negativity, as opposed to a clinical
experience of psychiatric illness is not addressed. However, the relevance of
this to the ethics of madness, and our response to the otherness it embodies,
may be of sustaining interest.

© 2005 Mark Welch

Mark Welch, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in the Faculty of
Nursing at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta and Co-Director of the
PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre for Nursing & Mental Health.

Categories: Philosophical