Of Madness and Terror: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Through his analysis of the history of Madness, Foucault's madman represents the necessary negative according to which the attributes of the reasonable man can be defined in a given society or better yet in a given system of power. As long as normality can only be defined in opposition to its pathological disorder, the madman becomes the only proof of the reasonable man's sanity. The madman's identity - as mad - is thus imposed on him by a superstructure, be it psychoanalysis, psychiatry or other institutions that have the power and authority to judge who is a madman in different moments of history ( Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Folie a l'Age Classique).

Madness becomes a necessity for any notion of normality. The madman functions as a Lacanian other, a negative image that helps sustain an illusion of unity and an image of the self consistent with the demands of the dominant system of power/knowledge. The political value of madness in society mirrors another 'pathological disorder': terrorism.

The mechanisms through which the terrorist identity (as the negative image of the non-terrorist) gets formed are similar to those of the madman's both in terms of there subjection to the dominant discourse (medical in the case of madness, and perhaps political/cultural in the case of terrorism) and in terms of their role as proof of the self's sanity or normality in accordance with the dominant system of values. The terrorist becomes a 'constitutive other' (Slavoj Zizek, Parralax View 258).

Like madness, terrorism is always negative otherness; the self is never terrorist, nor must it be mad. Following Zizek, and his reading of Lacan, nationalism, and it would be possible to extend the definition to include any form of identification to a group, is a domain of eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The aim of the nation becomes a given community's organization of its enjoyment through myths of identity (national myths). The other - the terrorist in this case - is rejected for his excess of enjoyment ('he wants to steal our enjoyment. By ruining our way of life.') and/or for his access to a secret, perverse enjoyment. the terrorist could be the object of hate for either his excess of enjoyment, or his strange and inaccessible way in which he organizes his enjoyment (Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative 202-3).

However, the other is no other at all; he is an other that forms part of the self; otherness exists not in exteriority it is rather interior. The other is in me. The implication of this is that the hate expressed towards the other's enjoyment is nothing but the hate of the self's own enjoyment. But what if, as Lacan's notion of Lack so clearly implies, we have never possessed the enjoyment allegedly stolen by the other? The refusal to admit this traumatic fact constitutes a central pillar of any myth of group identity; enjoyment always exists in our past. Terrorism as the absolute otherness, and the absolute hate directed towards it, are the concealment of hate directed by the self to it's own enjoyment. The excessive and symptomatic use of the word terrorist to describe the absolute other thus pertains to a protective field - or a defense mechanism - preventing the self from recognizing its 'self' in the image of this hated other; an illusion that transforms the mirror the self is gazing at into a window it is looking through.

Painting: Rene Magritte, Le Faux Miroir