إشكالية العقل و اللاعقل عند ميشال فوكو

Abstract EN

The subject of “the problematic of reason and irrational according to Michel Foucault” plunges us into a conflicting world and a dialectical relationship established by the Western mind at the Middle Ages to the Classical Age, from its expulsion into the nave of fools to its entry into the experience of imprisonment -which is a place full of mixed types of irrationals: heroics, lunatics, perverts, homosexuals…, who find themselves coexisting with each other-.

At every moment, the irrational begins to know its state more to the extent of its independence from the mind, and at every moment the mind becomes more and more anxious about the irrational, and this is seen as animal anger, as an expression of demonic power, as punishment for corrupt intent, or as magical power or Charisma transcends reason, for it can predict what may happen in the short or long term, making it a symbol of reverence before it takes the form of death.

While the irrational is nothing but the offspring of the medium, it is the other face of Western civilization and culture in which the experience of alienation, exclusion and isolation.

It is an experience through which the irrational will lose its truth, because the irrational is nothing other than the one who has lost his truth and has lost himself in losing it.

This is why Michel Foucault wrote “History of madness in the Classical Age”, not to imitate or criticize Western thought, but rather revealing the other side of this Western culture, through the problem of irrationality which is above all what brings it to light, and in its relation to the world of the spirit, of tragedy, of passion, of death, of the soul, of the body, of oppression, of punishment and of reform.

From his archeological approach, which is characterized by giving voice to the separated, the disconnected, the marginal, indicating in this that the irrational can be a debatable phenomenon, within the framework of his project of self-study.