Francisco Goya, Yard with Lunatics c.1793-1794There are some beautiful pages in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization about Goya :
‘Goya’s Idiot who shrieks and twists his shoulder to escape from the nothingness that imprisons him—is this the birth of the first man and his first movement toward liberty, or the last convulsion of the last dying man? (281)’
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (Vintage Books/Random House, New York, 1988 (1965))
it’s probably a good idea to supplement
this idea of Foucault’s with those in A/O/ to
wit the schizoanalytic adventure revises or rethinks the notions
invented and considered by Fou in Madness and
civilization__________there’s a kind of back an’ forth of ideas …; then a
question arises, do these ideas change each other? in ideas
as in poetry and painting the poems that came after or around the same are affected and affectin’ those before and after them. time is disjoined by these crossovers/ in a sense then there’s no time in ideas /and poetry. affects/ percepts….. I dont mean to suggest that, I mean I dont mean to say the actual painting of \Goya is changed by say, Picasso’s
later working of not dissimilar ideas yet our eyes ’ perception is change. How I read a poem is changed by the poems I’ve read already… thus those other poems are too affected… there’s an idea in literary theory, that what we read’s always already been read… now that’s interesting cause is it read behind our bacK? Call it: Reading Behind our back . A perceptual consideration… none of which is bad, but increases our possibilities…
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