Foucault’s Madness and Civilization

While the significance of his contribution is controversial, there is little doubt that Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers of the last half of the twentieth century.  Likewise while it remains the subject of intense controversy, the impact of his first major text Madness and Civilization is also undeniable. And the long-awaited English translation of the full text (under the title of The History of Madness)provides Anglophone readers the possibility of studying Foucault’s classic work in detail. Madness and Civilization not only addresses the nature of madness and sanity, normality and pathology, the asylum as the prototype of the exclusionary institutions that became prevalent in modernity, the role that the emergence of psychiatry played in the formation of instrumental rationality, the modern subject and bio-power, the significance of psychoanalysis and the centrality of transgression to modernist culture.  It also provoked heated debates on all these topics that continue today and that we will examine in this class. The place that the work occupies in Foucault’s career is also a topic of much controversy in Foucault scholarship.  Does it represent a piece of romantic juvenilia that Foucault quickly abandoned to move on to a more politically and theoretically sophisticated position?  This is the view that Foucault and many of his defenders tend to hold.  Or did it in fact provide a template for the rest of his career, as many as his more critical interpreters maintain?  We will also examine this controversy, examining in particular the relation between Madness and Civilizationand his late volumes on The History of Sexuality.