The Limits of Knowledge

Abstract

What are the limits of knowledge? Where do we find that moment when knowledge collapses and its otherness is found? And what would we find beyond such limits, beyond knowledge and meaning? Madness will test knowledge to its limits; not just what is known and knowable, but how some things become located as knowledge. This is one of the forces of madness, of how it contests understanding and meaning, of its resistances to knowledge. For, in this force of madness, we find knowledge’s Other and a construction of knowledge outside itself. This is because madness declares knowledge in its processes of non-meaning and makes systems of knowledge question themselves. For, in madness, knowledge is not so much negated, but rather tested and questioned. Its limits are found through the processes of challenging those aspects that allow knowledge to stand. And let us not forget, or underestimate, the productive side of that which exists outside of knowledge. In the force of madness a demand to be known emerges, a demand to develop understanding. A simple anecdote will serve to illustrate this. Freud ‘realises/discovers/invents’ (what word can suffice here?) the superego when one of his patients said to him ‘I feel a dog over me’ (je sens un chien sur moi).⁶⁸