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HUMANITIES INSTITUTE ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008
The Other Side of Reason: The History of Madness Today
Center for the Arts, UB North Campus, October 31—November 1, 2008
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Taking its inspiration from the recent publication of the complete English translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, this conference aims to examine various histories of madness and what “madness” means today. Foucault reinvented history as a discourse capable of articulating the intimate yet hostile relationship between madness and reason, especially on the far side of the most ambitious attempts to uphold rationality as the basis of human institutions. The questions raised by History of Madness seem especially timely in an era that increasingly invokes “reason” to adjudicate unforeseen ethical and political crises. Yet the urgency of contemporary predicaments all too easily rationalizes the speedy elimination of “madness,” thereby prompting a return to forms of violent confinement—such as “indefinite detention”—that were the object of Foucault’s original critique. Mindful of this critique, our conference seeks to think through manifestations of madness that remain inseparable from its “others,” whether understood as reason, civilization, philosophy, normalcy, law, the university, and so on. |
NAVIGATION
Visitor Parking and Directions
CONFERENCE PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL
View / Download Conference Poster (13MB)
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Pre-Conference Events
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Ian Hacking, CC, Ph.D., FRSC, FBA is a Canadian university professor and philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science.
He has undergraduate degrees from the University of British Columbia and the UNiversity of Cambridge, where he was a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Hacking also took his Ph.D. at Cambridge, under the direction of Casimir Lewy, a former student of Wittgenstein's.
He taught at UBC as an Assistant Professor, then an Associate Professor, spending some time teaching at the Makeree University College in Uganda. He became a lecturer at Cambridge before shifting to Stanford . After teaching for several years at Stanford University, he taught for a brief time in Germany. He became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1983 and University Professor (the highest honour the University of Toronto bestows on faculty) in 1991, while also lecturing at Princeton and Cambridge on and off. From 2000 to 2006, he was the Chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts at the Collège de France.
Hacking is known for bringing a historical approach to the philosophy of science and was one of the important members of the "Stanford School" in philosophy of science, a group that also included John Dupre, Nancy Cartwright, and Peter Galison. Despite his strong interest in historical revolutions in science (following the work of Thomas Kuhn), Hacking defends a realism about science, "entity realism," albeit only on pragmatic grounds: the electron is real because human beings use it to make things happen. This form of realism encourages a realistic stance towards the entities postulated by mature sciences but skepticism towards scientific laws. In his later work (from 1990 onward), his focus has shifted from the physical sciences to psychology, partly under the influence of the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault was an influence as early as The Emergence of Probability (1975), in which Hacking proposed that the modern schism between subjective or personalist probability, and the long-run frequency interpretation, emerged in the early modern era as an epistemological "break" involving two incompatible models of uncertainty and chance. Foucault's approach to knowledge systems and power is also reflected in Hacking's work on the social construction of psychiatric disorders and institutional roles for statistical reasoning in the 19th century.
In 2002, he was awarded the first Killam Prize for the Humanities, Canada's most distinguished award for outstanding career achievements. In 2004, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Hacking was last appointed visiting professor at University of California, Santa Cruz for Winter 2008.
Conference Schedule
Friday, October 31
9:30 a.m. Registration, Center for the Arts, North Campus
9:50 a.m. Welcome
Tim Dean, Department of English, Director, Humanities Institute, UB
Bruce McCombe, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
10:00-11:30 a.m.
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Departments of History and Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University
Narcissism Normalized: Heinz Kohut's Psychoanalytic Revolution
Moderator: Susan Cahn, Department of History, UB
11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Guy Le Gaufey
Psychoanalyst, École Lacanienne de Psychoanalysis, Paris
Knitting Foucault, Purling Foucault
Moderator: Steven Miller, Department of English, UB
2:30-4:00 p.m.
Benjamin Reiss
Department of English , Emory University
Creative Writing and Psychiatric Surveillance: Virginia Tech and the Politics of Risk Management
Moderator: Carrie Tirado Bramen, Department of English; Executive Director, Humanities Institute, UB
4:15-5:45 p.m.
Bruce Jackson
Department of English , University at Buffalo
Out of Time and Doing Time: When Madness Became Criminal
Moderator: Lisa Szefel, Department of History, Pacific University
Saturday, November 1
9:30 a.m. Registration, Center for the Arts, North Campus
10:00 a.m. - 11:30 p.m.
Marjorie Garber
Departments of English & American Literature; Visual & Environmental Studies
Harvard University
Mad Lib
Moderator: Donald E. Pease, Humanities Institute Distinguished Scholar in Residence
11:45 a.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Elizabeth Povinelli
Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
The Exclusions of Reason: Ab-Original Truth, Rhetoric, Genealogy
Moderator: Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Department of Anthropology, UB
2:30-4:00 p.m.
Screening: Titicut Follies (1967)
Frederick Wiseman's controversial documentary about the treatment
of criminally insane inmates at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution.
Moderators: Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, Department of English, UB
Conference Speakers
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Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and of Visual & Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is also Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. She is a senior Trustee of the English Institute, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, and served until recently as the President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. A graduate of both Swarthmore College and of Yale University, she has taught at Yale, at Haverford, and - since 1981 - at Harvard.
Garber has published thirteen books (two more are forthcoming this year), and edited twelve collections of essays. The scope of her work is both broad and deep - her topics range from animal studies to literary theory - but her work has mostly been centered on Shakespeare. Garber has written five widely admired books on the playwright, including her most recent, Profiling Shakespeare (Routledge, 2008) and Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 2004), which received the 2005 Christian Gauss Book Award from Phi Beta Kappa.
Described by Jonathan Culler as "consistently our shrewdest and most entertaining cultural critic," and by Catherine R. Stimpson, as "the liveliest, wittiest, and most scintillating of writers about culture," Garber has also published a number of works of cultural criticism and theory: Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge, 1992); Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995); Dog Love (Simon & Schuster, 1996); Symptoms of Culture (Routledge, 1998); Sex and Real Estate (Pantheon, 2000); and Quotation Marks (Routledge 2002). Her work on issues concerned with educational theory and university culture include Academic Instincts (Princeton, 2001) and A Manifesto for Literary Study (University of Washington, 2003).
Garber has two new books forthcoming this year. In Patronizing the Arts (Princeton University Press, fall 2008), Garber discusses the double meaning of the word "patronizing" and the way patronage (by government, by business, by individuals) has influenced the reception of the arts in the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on her own experience as Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, and chair of the department of Visual and Environmental Studies, she argues with characteristic wit and passion for the centrality of the arts and culture in education today, and puts forward a vision of the university as patron of the arts. The second forthcoming book, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon, winter 2008), focuses on the reciprocal relationship by which modern culture makes Shakespeare, and Shakespeare makes modern culture.
Garber is currently at work on a collection of essays about the humanities, and on a new book about literature and its place in life.
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Bruce Jackson is an ethnographer, photographer, novelist and filmmaker. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor, holds University at Buffalo's Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture, and has been the director of the University's Center for Studies in American Culture since 1972. He is the author or editor of 26 books, the most recent of which are The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories (Temple 2007), Cummins Wide: Photographs from the Arkansas Penitentiary (Center for Documentary Studies and Center Working Papers, 2008) and Pictures from a Drawer: Prison and the Art of Portraiture (Temple 2009). His study of men waiting to be executed in Texas, Death Row, done in collaboration with Diane Christian, resulted in a film (1979) and book (Beacon 1980). The film was widely broadcast on American public television and was broadcast on French television as part of François Mitterand's successful campaign to end capital punishment in France. A translation of the book appeared in Jean Malaurie's Terre Humaine series (Plon), as did Jackson's earlier ethnographic study, In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience, which was published in the series as Leurs prisons and featured an introduction by Michel Foucault. Jackson is a Guggenheim Fellow, he was nominated for a Grammy, and in 2002 the French government appointed him Chevalier in l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Guy Le Gaufey received his Masters in Contemporary and Modern History in Bordeaux, France and then went on to study Semiotics with A.J. Greimas, for five years, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. In 1971, he became interested in psychology. He became a member of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1973, and began a private practice as a psychoanalyst in Paris in 1975.
Le Gaufey was an active member of the École Freudienne de Paris until its dissolution in 1981. The same year, he and four colleagues established the revue of psychoanalysis Littoral, which produced 31 issues until 1989. He was the co-founder of the École Lacanienne de psychanalyse in 1985, and successively was secretary of this school (1985-1989), and Director (1992-1996 and 2000-2004). Since 1987 until 1994, he worked regularly with the Psychotherapy Study Group run by Cormac Gallagher in Dublin.
Le Gaufey has published widely in different revues, in France and abroad. Almost all of his publications are available at http://homepage.mac.com/legaufey. His books include: L’incomplétude du symbolique (epel, Paris, 1991); L’éviction de l’origine (epel, Paris, 1994); Le lasso spéculaire. Une étude traversière de l’unité imaginaire (epel, Paris, 1997) ; Anatomie de la troisième personne (epel, Paris, 1999); Le pas tout de Lacan. Consistance logique, conséquences cliniques (epel, Paris, 2006) ; and El caso inexistente. Una compilación clínica (epeele, Mexico, 2006). Translations from English to French include: Philip Larkin, Church going, 64 poems in a bilingual translation (Solin, Paris, 1991; Ian Dowbiggin, La folie héréditaire (epel, Paris, 1993) ; Leo Bersani, Le rectum est-il une tombe? (L’unebévue, Paris, 1999 ; Georges Bauer, Tu m’, ou l’hérétique érotique de Marcel Duchamp (L’unebévue, Paris, 1999) ; John Rajchman, Constructions, L’unebévue (Paris, 2000) ; Vernon Rosario, L’irrésistible ascension du pervers entre littérature et psychiatrie (epel, Paris, 2000) ; Judith Butler, Antigone. La parenté entre vie et mort (epel, Paris, 2003) ; Elisabeth Ladenson, Proust lesbien (epel, Paris, 2004) ; and Mark Jordan, L’invention de la sodomie dans la théologie médiévale (epel, Paris, 2006).
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Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe, with allied interests in women and gender, intellectual and cultural history, and the twentieth-century United States. She is the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton 1994, 1996), which traces psychiatry’s early-twentieth-century transformation from a discipline concerned primarily with insanity to one equally concerned with normality, as focused on normal persons and their problems as on the insane; it was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize, the Morris D. Forkosch Prize, and the History of Women in Science Prize. With the psychoanalyst Bennett Simon she wrote Family Romance, Family Secrets (Yale 2003), which focuses on an earliest surviving account of a psychoanalytic treatment of hysteria. Professor Lunbeck has also co-edited three additional volumes, most recently Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases and Exemplary Narratives, with Angela Creager and Norton Wise (Duke 2007). At present she is completing The Americanization of Narcissism, which examines the consolidation of narcissism as a clinical category and as cultural critique. Grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Charles Warren Center, among others, have funded her research and writing.
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Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Professor of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG) at Columbia University. She was the editor of Public Culture from 2000-2004, and is now Senior Editor of the journal. She is currently the Director of IRWaG. Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism. This critical task is grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. She is the author of three books, Labor's Lot (Chicago, 1994), The Cunning of Recognition (Duke 2002), and The Empire of Love (Duke, 2006). She is currently completing a new book, tentatively titled, The Tense of the Other: Economies of Abandonment in Late Liberalism.
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Photo taken at former site of the New York State Lunatic Asylum, Utica NY
Benjamin Reiss is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Emory University. His new book, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008) explores the utopian "moral treatment" movement to rehabilitate the insane that resulted in a wave of publicly funded asylums from approximately 1830-1870. The first part focuses on the creative lives of patients and the cultural demands of their doctors. Their frequently clashing views turned practically all of American culture-from blackface minstrel shows to the equally ubiquitous works of William Shakespeare-into a battlefield in the war on insanity. The second part shows how asylums touched the lives and shaped the writing of key figures, such as Emerson and Poe, who viewed the system alternately as the fulfillment of a democratic ideal and as a kind of medical enslavement.
In addition, Reiss is the author of The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Harvard University Press, 2001) and an editor of the Cambridge History of the American Novel (forthcoming). His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, American Literary History, ELH, and other journals; and he is currently at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reiss has also taught at Tulane University, and he is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, and the Louisiana Board of Regents.
Conference is free and open to the public. Advanced registration is not required.
Visitor Parking and Directions
Valid permits must be properly displayed Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. - 3 p.m. Parking permits are not required on Saturday.
Parking for visitors is limited to certain lots and metered areas on each campus. Visitors to the North Campus can park in the Center for Tomorrow Lot off Flint Road, without a charge, and utilize our shuttle service. Additionally, on the North Campus, Visitor Paid Parking is available in the Fronczak Lot. There is an entry charge of $4.00 ($2.00 after 1:00 p.m.).
Persons invited to UB by a specific department or organization of the University are considered guests and are eligible for guest permits (no charge). Guest permits must be dated, and are valid in faculty/staff and student lots. One-day guest permits are also valid in Visitor Paid Parking areas. Permits should be obtained through the inviting department and in advance of arriving on campus. The Visitor Information Centers may issue Guest Permits, but only when the inviting department is reached to confirm the invitation.
Please contact ub-humanities-institute@buffalo.edu or 716.645.2711 to obtain a guest parking permit.
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Related Events
ENG 575 –HIS 549 HISTORIES OF MADNESS
Prof. Tim Dean/Prof. Susan Cahn
Monday 4:00-6:40 p.m.
Park 532
Registration Number: 461438
This crossdisciplinary seminar is being team-taught by Tim Dean (English) and Susan Cahn (History). It meets in the History Department seminar room at a History timeslot. The course is a Humanities Institute graduate seminar, planned to coincide with the HI annual conference, “The Other Side of Reason: The History of Madness Today” (Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 08). By taking advantage of the conference (as well as of the instructors’ research in the history of mental illness, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis), the course extends interdisciplinary conversation about histories of madness from one weekend to an entire semester. We also plan a field trip to H. H. Richardson’s Buffalo State Hospital for the Insane (date yet to be determined).
One starting point for this course is the recent publication of History of Madness, the first full English translation of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), which existed only in partial translation as Madness and Civilization (1967). The new translation adds over 400 pp. to the latter work. That Foucault’s first major book—and one of his most groundbreaking—has become fully available in the Anglophone world only now suggests that the time is ripe for a reassessment of its significance and a reconsideration of its influence on the histories of mental illness that it helped inspire.
After some engagement with Foucault’s methodological innovation on the subject of madness, the course will focus on histories of mental illness beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the present, with particular emphasis on the US context. Topics for consideration include: Implications of thinking about madness or mental illness as historically variable phenomena; histories of treatment; history of institutionalization and confinement; role of DSM & the pharmaceutical industry in shifting definition of mental disorders; madness and art/literature; madness as a source of aesthetic creativity; the relationship between madness and sense. Readings are likely to include work by: Dana Becker, Phyllis Chesler, Arnold I. Davidson, Shoshana Felman, Michel Foucault, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jan Goldstein, Ian Hacking, Richard C. Keller, R. D. Laing, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Adam Phillips, Benjamin Reiss, William Styron, Carla Yanni.
PAST CONFERENCES
Browse our Annual Conference PDFs
2007 Human Trafficking
2006 Genealogies of the Humanities
2005 New Futures: Humanities, Theory, Arts
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