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It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in Patrice 1\ rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. 4 On the I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joseph J. 5 Disciplin A companion to Foucault I edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary, Jana Sawicki. p.cm. Alan D. ! Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3406-7 (cloth) 6 Reading 1. Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. I. Falzon, Christopher, 1957- II O'Leary, Timothy, Richard, 1966- III. Sawicki, Jana. B2430.F724C6545 2013 7 From Rf 194---<lc23 Paul Patl 2012036592 8 Foucaul1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Paul Rab Cover image: Photo of Michel Foucault © Sipa Press / Rex Features. Cover design by Design Deluxe. Part II Kn, Set in 10/ l 2. 5 pt Photina by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 9 Foucaul1 Printed and bound in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd LindaM 2 2014 cone 2 exp!, H said, History of Madness and its s1 dim, COLIN GORDON tion of tl and that and you: of t fresl "The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that avai he comes when he disembarks." 'I Michel Foucault, History of Madness, 11 the upt1 "There is no establishment of truth without an essential positing of otherness; the truth is never IDOi the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life." polt Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 165 of~ tive The History of Madness (HM) is Michel Foucault's first major work, his longest single fror work, and the work that established his reputation in France. Thirty years after its intt publication, France's leading mediaeval historian, Jacques Le Goff, described Foucault as "the philosopher who proved himself here one of the great historians of our time," and this book as "a pioneering masterpiece of historical anthropology and a still une­ qualled model of interdisciplinary study" (Laharie 1991: vii). Although Foucault sub­ sequently corrected and criticized it in various ways, it always remained, through successive redescriptions, an integral component or stage in the later accounts he gave of his intellectual enterprise. It is a work in which (even more strikingly when read in company with its companion, posthumously published doctoral text, Foucault's introduction to his translation of Kant's Anthropology) one can discern the matrix It i: and anticipation of every phase of his subsequent work, down to the most recent "Tl posthumous publications which are continuing to expand our understanding of itie his overall project. Whereas for a time Foucault's successive displacements of perspec­ pru tive seem to present themselves as shifts away from the starting point, later it seems lov more that the curve of the spiral leads back to recurrences and new contrapuntal aft, resonances of his opening themes, now within a more ample, complex and extensive Gh his ins er£ ge1 A Companion to Foucault, First Edition. Edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary, and Jana Sawicki. po © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. spi 84 HISTORY OF MADNESS conceptual topology, whose challenges and possibilities we are still in the process of exploring. How today should one read, or write about History of Madness? It should be simply said, first of all, that it is a book which, after decades of notoriety, misrepresentation, and neglect, merits a careful and complete reading, with a due degree of attention to its stated aims, declared methods, and conceptual structure, as well as to its affective dimensions, which later commentary is perhaps too eager to treat as matter for depreca­ tion or denigration. It is perhaps more advantageously read with some understanding of the field of adversarial relations and adversities in which it originally positions itself, and has become positioned through subsequent discussion and controversy. As a book that in its full form has been - at least in the Anglophone world - long unavailable and largely unread, it might finally find its audience as one of the works of what a younger generation of readers has taken to calling the "new Foucault," the Foucault of the lectures published and translated since the millennium, through which a fresh, rich, and unfamiliar perception of his intellectual venture has become newly dthat available. The intensification of political questions around psychiatry - the revelation of . s, 11 the role of Soviet psychiatry in the persecution and repression of dissidents, and the uptake of anti-psychiatric ideas in the 19 60s by sections of Western leftism - is com­ never monly supposed to have supervened only in the years after the writing of HM, giving polemical notoriety to a work whose critical perspective on the historical beginnings ,165 of psychiatry, set against the background of the large-scale deployment of administra­ tive internment in early modern Europe, originally springs, it is often supposed, more from literary-philosophical romanticism than a political analysis. However, in a radio interview given in 19 61 we already find Foucault commenting: I was struck very recently to read in the press about the new Soviet legislation, and I believe the general policies in Soviet countries, against "social parasites" [... ] and I found it strik­ ing that this legislation coincided closely in its terms with our equivalent legislation of the seventeenth century: as though the moral and social order of bourgeois mercantilism and the social and moral order of contemporary socialism were based on identical principles. 1 It is unlikely that it did not already occur to Foucault, when he coined in HM the term "The Great Internment" to designate the measures initiated by the French royal author­ ities in 1656, that the phrase might act as a reminder of more recent events: these parallels will have appeared more flagrant and provocative a decade or more later, fol­ lowing the publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. 2 In a discussion in 1977, after the furor caused by the anti-communist and anti-Marxist writings of Andre Glucksmann and the "nouveau philosophes," Foucault implicitly endorses their use of his work to make precisely that rapprochement: "Like all political technologies, the Gulag institution has its history, its transformations and transpositions, its functions and effects. The internment practiced in the Classical Age is in all likelihood a part of its genealogy" (PK. 135). More than is usually noted, as we shall see further below, the wield. political Foucault of later years is already fully present in HM; and HM is a text that still speaks to our political realities. 85 COLIN GORDON son's intellectua Goals and Methods non-being. a stn words." Foucaul The 19 61 preface to HM, part-translated in the 19 64 abridged English translation Archaeology of K Madness and Civilization, omitted from the 19 72 and subsequent French editions, is between his arcl without doubt one of the most arresting texts Foucault wrote.