TL;DR --> Private madness is accounted for, classified, and then expunged (or, rather, sought to be expunged) whereas public madness is unaccounted for, justified, even sanctified. Same is true of crime.

Hello, world! I'm currently re-reading two books - The Gene by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. Mukherjee is my favourite writer - he renders into magical verse the most scientific and technical of subjects that one could possibly encounter - the turn of phrase, the use of intelligent metaphors, the command over language - is simply riveting. Foucault is .. well, Foucault! Both books (The Gene and Madness and Civilization) devote a great amount of mindspace to the subject of Schizophrenia - which is quite telling of the relative importance of this subject among academics and philosophers who are not psychiatrists or psychologists.

Dr. Mukherjee is a cancer biologist by profession. By virtue of his literary works, he is also a historian of science, or, rather a biographer of pathology (and, by implication, also of 'normalcy'). He approaches the subject of schizophrenia from his characteristic historic/biographical, even autobiographical manner, drawing on his personal family history which is intertwined with the history of the Partition.

In the opening pages itself, Dr. Mukherjee weaves magic with the written word - presenting a treatment of the Partition as Schizophrenia which is an apt metaphor for the identity crisis, the split with reason, and the violence that it brought in its wake. Mukherjee's writing is riveting but comfortable - he doesn't require much of you as a reader. He doesn't require you to step outside your established typifications of what is normal, and what is pathological. He doesn't require you to, at once, suspend all reason, all known categories and learn anew.

Foucault, on the other hand, requires a lot of his reader. He requires you to let go of all that you think you know, and swap worldviews at the very outset, if you are to understand him. He views the very act of defining 'non-reason' (madness) and separating it from the realm of reason with suspicion, calling it "the subjugation of reason over non-reason." Foucault is a post-structuralist, and he questions the very act of classification and subsequent expulsion of non-reason from the social mainstream, calling the act of confinement (institutionalisation) of one's fellow beings itself a madness of another kind.

Mukherjee doesn't set out to question the premise of this other madness, but might end up doing so nevertheless, as he gently introduces the possibility of viewing schizophrenia from the perspective of inclusion - in passages where he talks about how his grandmother shielded his uncle (her son, Jagu) - who was diagnosed with schizophrenia - from what Foucault would've termed the tyranny of institutionalisation, by providing him asylum in the most literal sense of the term.

While confinement or institutionalisation is an act of exclusion by way of inclusion (into the category of non-reason), the act of Mukherjee's grandmother shielding Jagu from such a classification can be seen as an act of inclusion by exclusion on her part (as Jagu remained under her care, mostly isolated from the world, though not institutionalised). Foucault was clearly, vocally, and explicitly critical of the former act of exclusion by way of classification, more so of the act following it - that of expunging non-reason from the social fabric altogether. Foucault calls clinical psychiatry a "monologue of reason about non-reason" - a 'monologue' itself being akin to madness, come to think of it.

If one were to put Foucault and Mukherjee in an imaginary dialogue, there would, at some point, emerge an argument as to how and why the mad gene should survive despite the repeated attempts at wresting it from the society over millennia if it weren't for the simple fact that it is part of the 'normal' human genome, that the normal and the pathological are closer than clinical psychiatry would have us believe, that the case for normalcy is overstated. However, what I intend to do here is put them both in dialogue with Dostoevsky's anti-hero, Raskolnikov.

I've recently finished reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky which might as well have been titled Raskolnikov's fever dream, as most of the novel takes place in the main character Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov's delirium which - though not true madness - serves a political purpose in Dostoevsky's plot, a literary trope often used by creative writers to speak uncomfortable truths.

Raskolnikov's magna carta is an article about how society views 'private' crime differently from 'public' crime - how crime is more easily forgiven when committed with an ideology or a political end in view - as opposed to when it is committed to serve individual end(s). This is the shortest possible summary, and it is familiar to students of sociology and criminology - crime as a social construct. Foucault similarly implores the reader to view madness as a social construct - or, rather, as a political project, as Foucault is not so much as sociologist as a philosopher of power. So, the very act of defining madness - at the moment of classification - is, in Foucault's view, a power move.

Mukherjee also ends up deconstructing what is normal and what is pathological, though more from his unique natural sciences vantage point which is way less demanding than the crushing weight of Foucault's opinions. I also finished reading Mukherjee's earlier work The Emperor of all Maladies in January wherein he argues that cancer (the disease) is really just a better-evolved, better-adapted version of our 'normal' human selves. In fact, in The Gene, he shows how humans are really just average- to poorly-adapted beings, running counter to the 'survival of the fittest hypothesis,' demonstrating how we really are products of pure probability - average selves.

In other words, what is 'normal' or 'healthy' or 'perfect' or 'fittest' and what is 'abnormal' or 'pathological' gets automatically called into question, even though that may not be Mukherjee's main preoccupation. In short, both Foucault and Mukherjee put us in dialogue with 'madness' - the former from a post-structuralist lens, and the latter from a popular science perspective.

How does this culminate in Raskolnikov's magna carta - the article that foreshadows his crime and his subsequent rationalisation of it? Basically, he describes a kind of moral relativism - if you kill one person, you are a criminal; if you kill a thousand, though, you are a hero!

[Through Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky is presenting a critique of ideological justifications for violence prevalent in the radical ideologies of mid-nineteenth century, pre-revolution Tsarist Russia, pregnant with reformist thought. Please note that the below paragraph is my reading of the said books/texts; the phrases in 'single quotes' are not actually used by the authors themselves.]

So, one can summarise Raskolnikov's hypothesis by saying that 'private crime' is accounted for, whereas 'public crime' is justified, even consecrated - the former is of the kind that lands him in a Siberian jail, whereas the latter is of the variety that deified Napoleon. Foucault similarly implores us to consider the madness of the moment when we decide to confine (institutionalise) a fellow citizen, seeking to expunge him from the social fabric altogether, to sever all dialogue with him - a kind of 'public madness,' if you will. Finally, in The Gene, Mukherjee writes that his uncles' 'private madness' was seen, in each case, as madness proper, but that the madness of the Partition was unaccounted for, the madness that happens in the name of ideology, in the name of a cause not seen as madness in a literal sense.

The modern version of this anomaly is easier to grasp: "If you owe the bank a hundred bucks, you owe the bank. If you owe a hundred thousand, you own the bank" - and its variants.

Raskolnikov argues that while an individual is punished for his violent act or petty crimes, large-scale violence is consecrated through some perverse logical leap.

To sum up, private madness is accounted for, classified, and then expunged (or, rather, sought to be expunged) whereas public madness is unaccounted for, justified, even sanctified. Same is true of crime - a private act of crime makes criminals, whereas mass violence makes heroes.