walking in the grounds of the asylum the sinking foundations of the world in which we live

“On all sides, madness fascinates man. The fantastic images it generates are not fleeting appearances that quickly disappear from the surface of things. By a strange paradox, what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth. When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth; the vain images of blind idiocy – which are the world’s Magna Scientia; and already, in this disorder, in this mad universe, is prefigured what will be the cruelty of the finale. In such images – and this is doubtless what gives them fantasy – the Renaissance has expressed what it apprehended of the threats and secrets of the world.”

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation (London: Routledge, 2001), 20.

Jesus and Madness…