Critical Madness Theory: A Way Of Interpreting Irrational Behavior As Political Action
by Bradley Kaye /
2013 / English / PDF
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This book offers an original philosophy "Critical Madness Theory" that discusses how social justice for the mad can be accomplished without stigmatization and marginalization. It offers new theories of continental European thought and answers the questions of how there can be political action in a postmodern era. This book was an attempt to create a totally unique philosophy utilizing continental thinking. The goal was to wed postmodernism, which has fallen out of fashion due to what constitutes a total misunderstanding of its main concepts, with canonical philosophers in the continental tradition, namely Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger. The philosophers whose work I utilized as exemplary of postmodernism, and mind you, they sometimes dismiss this classification due to its misuse, are Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Felix Guattari. The overarching concern of this book is to view irrationalism in their work as a method of political agency, which I backed up with field observations in local bi-polar support groups in the Binghamton area. The point was to fuse continental philosophy with real therapeutic praxis, which culminates in an aesthetic conception of living, and ethics, which I view as ongoing processes that change as times change. The theme that runs through the whole book is a certain material-mortal approach to death whereby the extremely miniscule time one has to live, if examined authentically, compels the subject to take political and ethical actions, precisely because life will appear precious, and that this approach to death has a radically therapeutic effect on some people.
