October 16 - 18, 2007 

The Hermeneutics of Madness

Peter L. Waldman

Deptartment of Urban Education

The City University of New York

We’re modern enlightened and we don’t agree with locking up patients We prefer therapy through education and especially art so that our hospital may play its part faithfully following according to our lights the Declaration of Human Rights. (Weiss, Marat/Sade, Act I, Scene 2)

Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction. (Artaud, 1958, 25)

“I’m not writing for the scum who want to have the cockles of their hearts warmed.” (Brecht, 1957, 14)

This essay explores the imbricated relationship between “madness” and “theatre” through the many lenses of Peter Brook’s film Marat/Sade. The filmed stage is posited as a hall of mirrors where representations of institutionalized discourses of madness and French Revolutionary politics are reflected and refracted. Brook’s version of Peter Weiss’s play utilizes Brechtian and Artaudian effects to present the heated discourse of Cold War politics: Marat’s Jacobinism being an untenable (and unattainable) Marxian ideal; Sade’s anarchism an inevitable descent into the chaos of late American capitalism. 

Authority and tradition are relics of the ancien regime (and Gadamer’s hermeneutics). Arguments among and between hermeneuts, literary critics, and philosophers, e.g., Gadamer, Derrida, and Foucault are brought to bear on ‘madness’ and ‘the mad’ as object and subject of theater, respectively. Brecht’s A-Effect, Gadamer’s distanciation, occasionality, the historical effect, (or, effective history Wirkungsgeschichte), and Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion are discussed at length. Questions as to why the Western stage has been obsessed with madness as object of inquiry are addressed.

Return to conference homepage