but what is insanity? and according to whom?

for french philosopher michel foucault, insanity is fundamentally a method of power.

insanity is necessarily social in nature, and appears in cases where social forces seek to remove agency from a subject. insanity is a mind that perceives “the world” differently, with the essential presumption that difference, in this case, is equivalent to “bad.” but buddhist philosophy calls into question those notions of good or bad on which we rely for interpretation of the world.

no interpretation of the world is stable, but in order to stabilize one interpretation of the world, others must be rejected. it is these varying interpretations - not “wrong,” not “bad,” but “different” which we label insanity in order to wrest control from the bearers of those allegedly pernicious beliefs.

in madness and civilization, michel foucault diagnoses the constructed nature of psychiatric insanity in a genealogical manner, demonstrating how insanity is reified in order to strengthen claims to sanity - and thus claims to power. Insanity, then, is not merely a natural category, but rather an instrument of hegemony, buttressing institutional power by marking a class as other. This subaltern class thus escapes the strictures of social control at one and the same time as it is thrust beyond the protective umbrella of power.

in anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, gilles deleuze and felix guattari illuminate how the psychoanalytic establishment would impose the oedipal structure on patients. deleuze and guattari, however, note how the structure of oedipus is not already present within those deemed insane, but rather it is imposed from the outside by the authority of the psychoanalyst. the response of deleuze and guattari is to uplift the schizophrenic perspective - one of free association, rhizomatic in nature. this echoes jacques derrida’s advocacy for privileging the free play of signs over some stable meaning which never existed before its structural mandate is imposed from the outside.