ABSTRACT
This chapter examines why, despite constant critique, schizophrenia remains strong as a clinical category. I inspect this resilience to reveal whether there is something more about schizophrenia than meets the eye, something that makes it indispensable to modern Western subjectivity. I conduct an exposition on how no true understanding of schizophrenia, the most mysterious of all mental illness, can restrict itself to biology or even psychology, but instead has to take into account the epistemic position of man as a subject of knowledge and history as examined by Foucault in The Order of Things. Contradictions, dualities, and polarities form an inalienable part of this understanding where the unresolved tensions are not so much due to the lack of better drugs or the right therapy, but instead due to the restrictions placed upon forms of thought by historical conditions.
