Foolish Citizens

Abstract

This chapter provides a history of reason told through the figure of the fool. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and the naturalization of madness as mental illness, the chapter brings to light the role folly has played in this process. The argument is that folly has been implicated in establishing the ‘mimicry of madness’ as a configuration to be analysed separately to madness. This is traced in humanist literature (the chapter focuses on Erasmus’s Praise of Folly 1511/1514) and in social and cultural histories of fools where a distinction was invented between ‘natural’ and ‘artifcial’ folly. In the renaissance, madness as folly became useful and desirable, but madness otherwise disappeared from within courts (as an incoherent knowledge of the ‘beyond’). In these ways, folly emerged as a structure that would come to stand ‘in between’ madness and reason, marking the border that distinguished them. Such imagined binaries are also shown to play into spatial and geographical configurations. This is illustrated through drawing on a tenth-century monograph by the scholar al-Nisabūri whose little book ‘Uqalā’ al-Majjanīn (in translation: The Wise Madmen) has never been translated from Arabic in its entirety and yet reveals the extraordinary breadth and incoherence of traditions of madness at the time, providing glimpses into experiences of madness that have largely disappeared today.