In his later years, in his seminars at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault insisted on the Greek notion of parrhesia: speaking frankly, telling the truth without mincing your words. Telling the truth to the other, including an unpleasant and perilous truth (because it risks offending the other), this is the core of parrhesia. 

I think that, besides his own mode of telling the truth, that of the teacher, which is what he was, in his works Foucault has constantly tried to apply parrhesia, this potentially dangerous way of telling the truth to the people of his time. 

Significantly, his last seminar before his death was called The Courage of Truth. (1) Here he concentrates on ancient thinking – into which he had pleasantly plunged himself in later years – and on parrhesia in particular as a way of telling the truth, but one connected to a risky way of life, that breaches common modes of thinking and living. The truthful discourse, in contrast to the discourse of the teacher, is one that requires courage. And this is perhaps the authentic ethical heritage of Foucault’s work.

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Few thinkers have polarized Western culture between impassioned advocates and firm critics quite like Michel Foucault did and continues to do, provoking a paradigmatic contraposition, reminiscent of the debates around Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Freud…

According to his critics, Foucault has become the paradigm of historical relativism, which they think denies any universal essence of humanity and ultimately rejects the very notion of “human nature”. Instead, his supporters have often elected him the theorist of pure condemnation of the disciplinary state, against a contemporary political set-up they think aims at controlling and surveilling populations – even biologically – and have in this way reduced him to a militant anti-establishment libertarian thinker. A militant passion was indeed present in Foucault, and though he was universally branded as an “anti-humanist” he was de facto a humanitarian. He promoted several “good” battles for civil rights and was an engagé intellectual involved in various forms of political struggle, no less than the Sartrean generation before him, which his theories sought to countervail.  He fought for better conditions for prison inmates, against capital punishment, against racism and in favor of immigrants; he was stopped and arrested by police several times. But this does not seem to me the truly original aspect of Foucault. We should move away from this anti-/pro-Foucault opposition. And, in particular, we should free Foucault from a great deal of Foucauldians – something that goes for all mentors, who need to be descaled from most of their followers.

There are two phases of Foucault’s thought, even though there isn’t a clear-cut separation between the two, but rather a slippage. Evoking the way Foucault himself described this mutation, I would say that he shifts from a history of power-knowledge to what he calls an alethurgy – from aletheia, truth in Greek. Foucault has attempted no less than a history of truth.

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Foucault began as a historian – though he called himself an archaeologist – in the field of those that are called the “human sciences” in France. For example, in The Order of Things (2) he reconstructs the history, from the Renaissance to the 19th century, of the formation of the modern categories – the “Quasi-Transcendentals”, as he calls them– of Work, Life and Language. In other words, the development of, respectively, political economy, biological classification and linguistics as inquiries upon the working subject, the living subject and the speaking subject. But what interested him most in this early phase of his work was to show how these forms of knowledge, with the human being as subject matter, confront what deviates from the norms of humanity, like the mad, the sick, the criminal and the dead. This reconstruction develops through works such as Madness and Civilization (3), The Birth of the Clinic (4), and Discipline and Punish (5)  in which he analyzes how, starting from the Renaissance, the disciplines we call today psychiatry, medical teaching, criminal justice and thanatology – forms of knowledge that are all also forms of power – formed.

These forms of knowledge were all developed by human beings supposedly alien to their subject matter: psychiatrists are not mad, doctors are not supposed to be sick, jurists and police officers are not criminals, and the living are not dead. Foucault shows how these forms of knowledge are linked from the beginning to “politics”, broadly speaking, to the different ways society decides to tackle madness, sickness, criminality and death. Because Foucault’s fundamental premise is that knowledge, which aims at determining truth, is also a form of power over others – and over oneself. So, Foucault brought to fame Bentham’s Panopticon, (6) a circular prison model with at the center a surveillance officer who, concealed from the observation of the prisoners, can see inside all the cells by simply turning his head. Foucault’s thought has long been identified with the condemnation of a social Panopticon, of the strategies implemented by the state, or the powers that be, to surveil and control populations. It’s not exactly like this, because Foucault has indeed interpreted knowledge on human beings as power strategies, but insofar as they wanted to affirm truths – on madness, on sickness, on criminality, but also on humanity itself. He said: “Where there is power, where power is necessary, where one wishes to show effectively that this is where the power lies, there must be truth.” (7) The aspect of power that interests Foucault is not the strength of a constriction, the declaration of “states of exception”, but the legitimization of power based on truth. Therefore, he later stopped using the word pouvoir, power – overused in the seventies – and replaced it with the terms government and governmentality; and instead of knowledge he began to use the term truth. In his latest phase, Foucault no longer talks of power-knowledge but of “government through truth”. He would also use another term, which was to become very popular: biopolitics.

Whereas zoé is life in the purely biological sense, animal life, Foucault interprets bios in the sense of what we desire, what we want to do, what we’re looking for. Biopolitics should then be read in the sense of a politics of desire, a politics that also has an effect on will, and on individual will too. Significantly, Foucault began his seminars on biopolitics dedicating a whole year to examining free-market (libéral) thought, (8) including what we call today neo-liberalism, to analyzing an apparently purely economic doctrine that aims at total freedom from the reins and restraints of the state. A model of economic organization is also a discipline of life, a biopolitics meant in the broad sense.

Indeed, Foucault’s late works, centered on the history of sexuality, in the ancient world in particular, show that his objective was by no means reducible to the idea of knowledge as an instrument of power over others. After all, in contrast to so many historians of today, Foucault doesn’t try to reconstruct the actual sexual behaviors of the ancient Greeks or Romans, of the early Christians, and so on; he only deals very marginally with the customs of real people. Foucault always raises history to the power of two; so, in this case, he deals with everyone who wrote about or reflected on sexuality from ancient Greece onwards. In short, he deals with those who claim to state truths about sexuality indicating ways to dominate it and control it. The difference, compared to the previous Foucauldian historiographies, is that those who wrote about sexuality didn’t only deal with something that concerned others, but themselves too: those who reflected on sexuality also had a sexuality. At this point the object of the description ceases to be a dominion over the behaviors of others, but becomes a potential government over oneself, i.e. over one’s sexual impulses and acts on the basis of a supposed truth of the sexed subject.

Therefore, by shifting his interest from a history of power-knowledge to one of truth and governing the self, Foucault frees himself from the burden of pragmatism, the philosophy which dominated the last century. Pragmatism considers truth a function of utility: true is what is useful to us. But this does not mean that Foucault returns to an objectivist vision of truth as guaranteed by a scientific method, to an “innocent” truth immune from any power project. According to Foucault every epoch has tried to speak the truth, no matter what truth; even the Christian religion, for example, aimed at putting the subject in relation to truth. (9) 

Foucault didn’t speak about psychiatric disorders, nor did he describe any mentally ill individuals, but he mainly spoke to us about the way medicine first and then psychiatry invested them with their knowledge creating different control apparatuses according to the epoch. He didn’t speak to us so much about criminals, (10) but rather about the reflection made by legal experts and reformers on the most effective and fairest ways to punish them, and so on. Foucault mostly dealt with the discourses of aristocracies, of the truths they told on the mentally ill, on the sick, on criminals and on sexuality. His history is mainly a history of more or less applied projects and dreams, more than a history of those who were the objects of these projects and dreams, something in obvious contrast to more Marxist approaches. In particular, he rejects the Marxist notion of a “dominant ideology”, according to which a particular ideology (i.e. a false consciousness) is dominant in each epoch, allowing a powerful élite to control and exploit the masses. Instead, what particularly interests Foucault is the power of truth.

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What many find disturbing about the early Foucault’s reconstructions is his emphasis on differences in history. The history of our relationship to all the deviances from life – and of sexuality as matrix of potential deviances from socially acceptable ways of life – is the history of the different ways of conceptualizing these deviances. Let’s take what Foucault said about homosexuality (11) (he was himself a homosexual): homosexuality, male and female, he thought, is a modern concept connected to Christian morality, which does not exist in the pagan world. (12) Something that irritated homosexual historians and activists who fought for the emancipation of all homosexuals taking for granted that “being homosexual” is something that has always existed, that LGBT+ is a coherent and “natural category”. (13) Yet, in other epochs there was no term corresponding to our “homosexual”, because the acts we classify as such today were conceptualized differently. In the ancient world it didn’t matter whether a man had sex with a man or a woman, what did matter was for the man to always have the active sexual role in both cases. What covered a man with shame was for him to give himself passively, as a female. The pertinent difference, therefore, was not between homo- and heterosexuals, but between active and passive men. In the Middle Ages the notion of “sodomite” did indeed exist, but it doesn’t overlap with that of homosexual today: “The sodomite had been a recidivist; the homosexual was now species.” (14) 

I’m sure that, had he lived longer, Foucault would have found it significant that today the terms “gay” and “lesbian”, both of literary origin, have replaced the word “homosexual” almost everywhere. (15) He would perhaps have called it a symptom of sexual equality, considering that until quite recently real homosexuality, the one that counted both for religion and sexology, was male homosexuality. Female homosexuality was paid no attention. The concept of “gay” served to exalt, by differentiation, also female homosexuality.  Foucault always stressed the historical relativity of concepts; something that won him the stigma of being the theorist of relativism.

In fact, Foucault’s thought is the scion of the historicist reaction to the Enlightenment. It derives, in other words, from the modern Romantic turn against the Enlightenment cult of the invariants of reason. Modern historicism developed as a critique of the doctrine of “natural law”, against the assumption of fundamental nature-culture identity; according to reason, it should have led to a theory of the historical relativity of values. Yet historicism, from Giovan Battista Vico onwards, terrified at its own vocation, invested its speculative strengths in reestablishing and legitimizing a faith in trans-historical absolute values. According to historicism there’s a presence of the absolute in history. The poverty of  historicism, according to the so-called post-modern point of view, is the fact that it isn’t thoroughly historicistic, that it became scared of the turn it had impressed on thinking.

Foucault’s position differs from this early historicism. Whereas traditional historicism counted on the recognition of the Sense of history, what I call post-historicism nurtures an intuition for pure historical difference, the sense of the incommensurable heterogeneities of the cultures and discourses of the past and present. Hegelian or Marxist historicism, based on a progressive and optimistic idea of history and on the humanistic character of historiography, claims to recognize the sense of History seen from above. Instead, post-historicists like Foucault prefer to redefine our current problems more in the dusk than in the light of opaque historical pluralities. Foucault’s particular sense of history derives in other words from his refusal to confer to history a univocal direction. Each epoch develops a government of self and of others based on a strategy of truth.

Does Foucault therefore not retreat with regard to relativistic consequences? This cannot be said either. There’s some absolute in Foucault too: not an ultimate sense beyond history, but a strength on this side of it. The will to power. 

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The sense of historiographical relativity has led some to think that Foucault was an anti-humanist. Indeed, at the time many, not just in the French cultural scene, were shocked by the conclusion to The Order of Things:

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it […] As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared […] then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (16)

At the time France was still dominated by existentialist culture in the broad sense, which decisively affirmed itself as humanist. For some (like Sartre) it was an atheistic humanism, for others (like Gabriel Marcel) a Christian one. This reference to the historical relativity of the concept of “man” was taken to be a declaration of war against the then dominant Parisian culture. It is obvious that Foucault never questioned the biological reality of Homo sapiens but questioned a particular philosophical reflection, a certain knowledge, which placed the notion of humanity at the center of attention and at the heart of conceptualizations on work, language and life (the three fields dealt with in The Order of Things). According to Foucault the centrality of the concept of “man” arose in the 19th century, when at one point God was reincarnated in humanity. Foucault rejects Man having taken the place of God (like in Feuerbach). Here too he raises history to the power of two: not a history of man, but a history of how man conceived of itself. And, in fact, today the term “sciences humaines” is being mostly abandoned in the scientific world in favor of references to the cognitive sciences, which thematize the mind, and not only the human mind. The power of knowledge, the modes of knowledge, will replace reflections that mainly thematized human essence.

Almost at the same time, in America T.S. Kuhn was working on an operation very similar to Foucault’s, doing with the natural sciences (17) what the latter was doing with the human sciences. And it so happens that many epistemologists and scientists abhor Kuhn, of course accusing him of “relativism” and in particular of not believing in scientific progress, in the fact that the sciences accumulate knowledge over the years. In fact, Kuhn points out that the sciences move over the years from one paradigm to another and that scientific knowledge within one paradigm is no longer valid if you change the paradigm. Kuhn calls extraordinary science the revolutionary phases of science where more paradigms confront each other on the stage without any prevailing absolutely. Examples of these phases of extraordinary science include the period between the late 16th century and the early 17th century characterized by the confrontation between the Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmological systems, between Aristotelian and Galilean physics and later that between Cartesian and Newtonian physics. Kuhn calls normal science those much longer phases during which all scientists in a given scientific community accept a common paradigm and concentrate on puzzles, i.e. on facts and phenomena reluctant to fit in the accepted paradigm, which need to be explained and forced to fit in. In science there is no process of continuous accumulation of discoveries and new theories, but instead science produces discontinuous leaps, through often dramatic paradigm shifts, that change the very sense of the “facts” a science is expected to explain. In short, the structure of the history of science is not too different from that of art history, often characterized by leaps (e.g. the introduction of geometric perspective in 13th century European painting, or the turn of the artistic avant-garde between the 19th and 20th centuries). This, however, does not lead Kuhn, as his critics believe, to denying that there is an accumulation of knowledge in science. This does occur, but always within a certain paradigm, in other words it is the product of the development of normal science. But what those who have a cumulative vision of scientific knowledge cannot tolerate about Kuhn – and even more about the radicalization of his theses carried out by P. Feyerabend (18) – is precisely this shattering of the “magnificent and progressive fate” that characterizes a certain scientific ideality.

We also find this sense of historical discontinuity in Foucault. He knows that historical mutations don’t limit themselves to giving different senses and interpretations to any one object that remains in time – madness, crime, sickness, work, sexuality and so on – but actually change their object. Each historical epoch deals with different “things”. Which is reminiscent of what Kuhn said, for example about a swinging chandelier. Before Galileo, when physics was Aristotelian, the chandelier was a sort of falling stone; after Galileo we see it as a pendulum. This way we understand how misleading the accusations of relativism against both Kuhn and Foucault are. Kuhn does not deny that there is a raw physical phenomenon – the swinging of something hanging on a cable – but simply says that it represents different objects of knowledge according to the paradigms a particular science imposes. In the same way, Foucault by no means denies that in all epochs we find mental illness – whether due to neurological, psychological or other unspecified reasons – , he doesn’t deny that there have been certain sexual practices in all epochs, he doesn’t deny that in all epochs and societies certain acts have been punished as criminal actions, and so on. What interests him is highlighting the differences in category that madness, crimes or sexuality assume according to the knowledge and practices of that epoch and society.

I would describe Foucault’s as a relative relativism, which may sound like a paradox. Foucault knew that historicist relativism is also relevant to a particular historical epoch, our epoch, which tries to do away with any absolutist premises. Foucault wanted to fully practice the relativism that characterizes our age, which is relativistic even when it flatly denies being so.

Foucault taught us to avoid coarsely projecting our own categories onto the past and to try instead to capture the moment of historical conceptual turns. By so doing he has given us a big hand to free ourselves from the tentacular invasiveness of commonplaces, meant as the lazy anachronistic conceptual repartitions that we find it convenient to identify in past or faraway societies. He encouraged us to capture the other not starting from shared traits with us – which leads to the typical historiographical trompe-l’oeil – but starting from the other’s differences from us.

Foucault’s passion for discontinuity doesn’t prevent him from also seeing historical continuities. He doesn’t even deny what the historians of the Annales (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and others) called “the long term”, the submerged continuity of particular concepts and customs beneath the surface of spectacular overt changes in the ethical or political paradigm. He accepts the work of the Annales school, which emphasized the slow evolution of practices and mentality. We can say that on the one hand we have history proper, which concentrates on continuities, and on the other hand a history of ideas, which focuses on discontinuities. (19) But later on Foucault would also find continuity in ideas. In his History of Sexuality, for example, he stresses that even Christian sexual moral, which we consider at the root of modern (until recently) sexual austerity founded on the monogamous couple, was not something Christianity created, but had already been perfectly developed by Stoic thinkers and several other pagan authors. Ruptures do occur, but they’re ultimately slower and less radical than how they may appear après coup.

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Many do not accept Foucault’s anti-foundationalism. Several intellectuals, philosophers in particular, think it is their duty to provide foundations for our beliefs and passions (whether political, religious or aesthetical). In other words, to build a set of arguments that will prove the validity of particular beliefs or passions. Foucault doesn’t think this is his function, though he had his own convictions – he was a man of the radical libertarian Left – but he never dreamt of “building foundations” for them. As the historian Paul Veyne (20), a friend and work partner of Foucault’s, points out, he never said “my political or social preferences are based on the truth”, but limited himself to saying: “The rationalizations some of my adversaries claim they can use to affirm the truth of their preferences are based on nothing.” After all, even the choice of our adversaries is based on nothing. In one seminar Foucault stated: “I can’t see, for now at least, what criteria will allow us to decide who to fight against, except perhaps some esthetic criteria.” Veyne again points out:

We should not oppose eternal truth to time, nor identify being with time; we should comfortably oppose, to both time and eternity, our actuality, i.e. our valorizing will… The only reality is the will to power as valorizing will, and everything else is a rationalistic illusion. (21)

In fact, Foucault too, at least in the early phase, has an absolute frame of reference: the will to power.

Foucault said the author he was most influenced by was Nietzsche, even though he had never directly dealt with him in his works. Foucault’s is a very Nietzschean historiographical theory.  Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht  becomes pouvoir, power. Modes of exercising power in Foucault are an ultimate sense on this side of history.

Foucault doesn’t think that power is concentrated in any particular place, or that there is a Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to be taken. We find power relations at all levels of the social: the power of parents over their children, of men over women, of leaders over their followers, of adults over children, of doctors over the sick and, above all, of the subject over himself (Freud would say of the Ego over the Es). But power is not something you possess, it’s something you exercise. If Foucault’s is a relativism of reason, it is accompanied, in no contradictory way, by an absolutism of will or of strength. In this sense his work – at least in the early phases – is part of a metaphysical project in a broad sense.

But Foucault analyzed the power relations that permeate social life from the particular angle of truth, i.e. from the angle of forms of knowledge that aim at affirming the truth. This relationship between truth and power (or government) is the privileged theme of Foucault’s works. His general subject matter doesn’t consist of society, but of the true/false discourse and its relationship to power. In a certain sense, for Foucault there is one Winter Palace of power, and it is science. And, in fact, dealing with the history of the human sciences – with the history of psychiatry, linguistics, economics, medicine and criminology – means dealing with the history of the strategies various epochs adopted to ultimately dominate other men and themselves while appealing to truth.

Will to power is never relativistic; every true will wants absolutely, while relativism is the corollary of the melancholy act represented by the registration, almost like a bookkeeping entry, of the irreducible plurality of the absolutisms of will.

There is however a fundamental problem. As Foucault sees the expression of a will to power in every knowledge, the question then arises: his work is undoubtedly a form of knowledge, so what power project does it express (even unconsciously)? If every knowledge is a power project, then an oasis of objective knowledge—let’s call it contemplative knowledge, detached from power dynamics—is inadmissible. There can be no supra-conflictual place from which to judge from the outside the sound and fury of social conflicts. Foucault’s works cannot be considered a mere condemnation of past or current power relations because it is itself a mode of knowledge. So, in what sense do Foucault’s works in turn represent a power-truth project? In what way is his own thought part of the “history of truth” he intended to tackle?

In fact, Foucault always impeccably played the game of the historiographical discipline as it is played in the academic world. Foucault undertook a brilliant scientific career. He was famous in his lifetime and was admitted to the Collège de France, the acme of the academic path in France. He followed the rules of historiographical and philosophical culture of his time strictly. Foucault’s life is a model– apart from his premature death – for countless intellectuals today, especially left-wing ones, who want to radically challenge the educational and university system in our Western societies while at the same time building thriving careers within that same system. It’s a case of having your cake and eating it too, which worked perfectly for Foucault but also signals an unresolved tension in what I would call “radical cultural criticism”. Today, the culture of radical critique of society increasingly takes refuge in academic institutions, as if these institutions were outside or above the society of which they themselves are a part. In the past, never radical thinkers (Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, Lenin, Sorel, Gramsci, Sartre…) would have thought that there was a place for them in the academic institutions!

Foucault’s works certainly produced transformations in the paradigms of the university and in the way historiography is done; Foucault became a role model in the academic world and was basically never a maudit. Could then this be proof that, in contrast to what Foucault thinks, some human sciences – in this case historiography – enjoy a certain autonomy from power-related social practices? Unless we recognize a power strategy in Foucault’s own work. In fact we can qualify Foucault’s works as Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense. Ultimately the theorists of Dionysianism were and are austere professors who spent years bent over their books, often tedious and arduous. The Dionysian professor idealizes women and men who lead instinctual lives, who do only what pleases them, but take good care not to imitate such a life in their concrete existence. 

Foucault never propounded reforms. Neither psychiatric, nor of penal systems, clinical practice or sexual legislation. Not only because propounding reforms, basically doing politics, was not his job, but also for a more profound reason: he ultimately knew that making specific reforms means moving from one form of government to another. Undoubtedly a more satisfying form of government for our modern ethical needs, a less repressive one, but in any case still a form of biopolitics. For example, in Italy, with Law 180, the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia succeeded in (partially) changing the system of psychiatric care by doing away with psychiatric hospitals (state ones at least). In Italy psychiatric hospitals are formally forbidden. But this doesn’t take away the fact that psychiatrists who are followers of Basaglia are still called upon to govern mental illness, i.e. what in mental illness is socially dystonic, what makes mentally ill living intolerable for social life. Even a reformed psychiatry has to continue “governing the living”. In the same way we can even try reducing detention in prisons to minimal levels as part of an essential system for controlling criminal behaviors, but in any case society will always be called upon to respond to criminal acts, to govern what the rest of society condemns and is afraid of. 

The lack of reform proposals by Foucault (which I don’t criticize at all) is hence a corollary of his underlying philosophy: we can never come out of biopolitics, of the government of humans, which will always somehow have aspects of containment and repression. We have witnessed this in 2020, with the constraints imposed on populations to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

Foucault could not present himself as a reformer precisely because his thought and lifestyle were Dionysian. The late sixties and early seventies – a season the Americans called post-structuralist – witnessed the blooming of Dionysian philosophies. In France: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Guattari, Maffesoli, Sollers – in Italy Vattimo and Negri - in the United States Feyerabend and many others - marked the Dionysian explosion in the European culture, and in some cases extra-European, of those years. Dionysianism is an ecstasy of the present; it has no past, no recipes for the future and wants to be an act of liberation with no future, I would say, a burning in the present enjoyment of this liberation.

After all, Foucault’s work indirectly favored changes in the fields he dealt with: psychiatry, clinical medicine, the penal system and sexual behaviors. Since then various attempts have been made to relieve prisoners from any arbitrary acts by their jailers. In clinical medicine many have begun to value the importance of the human relationship between doctor and patient rather than the pure objectivity of the medical eye. As for sexual behavior, huge changes in customs have taken place in the last 50 years, in particular the acceptance of homosexuality with institutions like civil partnerships, the decline of marriage as the standard mode for heterosexual couples, and so on. In short, Foucault’s work was not inactual – as Nietzsche’s thought claimed to be. It was entirely actual for his epoch (and for ours). Foucault did by no means preach in the wilderness, even though he didn’t preach anything. But should we then apply to Foucault’s own works the analytical codes he used for the authors he analyzed? 

Foucault insisted on actuality as the criterion of his strategy. And this sense of actuality makes him say, for example, “Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.” (22) Foucault followed the gods of actuality. As he said himself:

To diagnose the present is to say what the present is, and how our present is absolutely different from all that is not it, that is to say, from our past. Perhaps this is the task for philosophy now. (23)

This is the strength of his work. He wrote mainly about the past, but aware of the actuality of this gaze back to the past. This faithfulness of his towards the gods of actuality is coherent with his rejection of the Christian eschatological God reincarnated in the philosophical and Marxist humanisms. Foucault is convinced of the historical partiality of his approach. In short, he wants to be a visceral witness of his time. Therefore his thought is not reducible to critical thought along the lines of the whining protest of the Frankfurt School. 

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Foucault’s undeniable attraction not only for criminals and the mentally ill but even for certain “monsters” has contributed to the demoniacal halo surrounding him. In I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother….(24) Foucault reconstructs an atrocious misdeed, a crime that took place in 19th century France, a Norman peasant who massacred part of his family. Foucault undoubtedly took an interest in extreme situations in which we can hardly recognize humanity, and this in literature too. Foucault dedicated a book to the author Raymond Roussel, a psychotic and patient of Pierre Janet, a hyperbolic dandy and the author of enigmatic novels full of descriptions of absurd machines – we basically find ourselves almost at the limits of literature. Roussel is a fascinating “monster of the novel”. (25) 

And it’s quite significant that the last seminars Foucault gave in 1984, shortly before his death, are centered on cynical philosophers, figures he most certainly found seductive. And in fact cynicism is a radical limit in philosophy, in the sense that it does away with all the theoretical aspects to make room for a completely “other” way of life, a provocative scandalous one going against any social convention. A way of denouncing social conventions. 

Foucault basically makes us focus on those who “lack humanity”. Does he then not extol these subjects with no humanity? This sympathy for “the baddies” was also in tune with the sixties and seventies. And indeed the cultmovie of the time was Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, in which viewers are led to sympathizing with two drug runners from Mexico; two outlaws. Foucault too aimed at creating sympathy for moral marginalization.

Did he feel marginal himself, an extra-human? 

This is not the place to examine Foucault’s personal life, and not out of any form of philosophical correctness according to which one shouldn’t refer to the private life of thinkers – a hypocritical separation Foucault would have disagreed with. I decline here to connect his personal life to his works because the enterprise would be too complex. The fact his father was a surgeon may explain his interest for the history of clinical practice. The fact that as a young man, attracted by suicide and self-mutilation, his father took him to see the most famous French psychiatrist of the time, Jean Delay, may explain his interest for mental illness and psychiatry. The fact he once described himself as a “juvenile delinquent” may explain his interest for criminals and prison conditions. In any case, Foucault’s life has always been characterized by a hybris, by sometimes destructive excesses. As a young man he indulged in drugs and alcohol, in sadomasochistic practices and in a rampant high-risk sex life that was certainly the cause of his death after contracting AIDS. We cannot therefore find in his works a theoretical temperance that would clash with his life intemperance. In his later years Foucault spent much time studying ancient wisdom, but within a theoretical project that separates wisdom and truth.

Is thinking that “Foucault’s thought expresses a disturbed personality” a reason to reject his thought? Let’s take someone like Caravaggio, whose life was famously marked by a murderous aggressiveness. We don’t reject his work because of this, though it’s more than evident that his works reflect his personality: they possess a violent quality, a ruthless, almost enraged glance on the real, one that cannot be separated from Caravaggio the man. Yet, even if we are not violent or short-tempered, we love Caravaggio. Because we’re attracted by his glance on the real, which reveals a dimension that’s not obvious to us. In the same way, even if we never had personal problems similar to Foucault’s, we’re attracted to his glance on the real. Not because he’s one of us, but simply because we’re attracted by the force of the truth of his gaze.

Foucault’s attraction for beings on the limits of humanity, or beings who went beyond these limits, is undoubtedly a philosophical symptom too. Foucault knows that every social order – every Government of the Living, in his terms – cannot accommodate everyone. Every order leaves someone out; it doesn’t necessarily produce – as Marxism believes – misery, but above all it excludes a slice of humanity that embarrasses every power project based on truth. The mentally ill, criminals, “monsters”, perverts, etc., are the proof that every governmentality implies leftovers. Foucault identified with these rejects. But he never backed any socialist projects – nor by any means the “real” socialisms, as they were called at the time – because he knew that even socialism produces scraps, rejects, products outside the limits of “humanity”. As history has shown.

7

“Mental illness can never be cured. Because it is not an illness”. 

(a psychiatrist in the film Hammamet by Gianni Amelio).

Foucault’s History of Madness connected Foucault to what was at the time called anti-psychiatry, the leading figures of which were considered Thomas Szasz in the US, Ronald Laing and David Cooper in the UK and – however equivocally – Basaglia and Democratic Psychiatry in Italy. Anti-psychiatry rejected the reality itself of mental illness: on the one hand it considered it a historical mode of classifying certain behaviors, on the other it considered it not an illness but a trip (as was said about the effects of hallucinogenic drugs) that shouldn’t be blocked or interrupted but that anti-psychiatry had to somehow accompany. In actual fact Foucault never denied that something like madness exists, even though he never defined it; every epoch had its definitions for it and he didn’t think it made sense to add a new one – the finally “true” definition of madness. What counted for a Dionysian philosopher like Foucault was establishing a new relationship with mad persons, one that wouldn’t reduce them to being simply an object of scientific study along the lines of positivism. Foucault gives no indications on how to treat madness appropriately, he limits himself to reconstructing how it has been historically conceptualized and controlled through various measures, of which the psychiatric hospital – still prevailing at the time the History of Madness was published – centered on the power of medical knowledge, was the most recent.

In any case, we shouldn’t believe many of Foucault’s hagiologists, who interpret his works along the lines of “allowing the mad to speak”. For example, Jacqueline Russ writes: 

To these sectioned patients who still populate our psychiatric hospitals in their thousands, Foucault grants a voice, a word, a discourse. The mad, like women and children, had been denied language and words for so long. Michel has given these things back to them. (26)

We can read even today thousands of these rosaries about the supposed liberation of the mad thanks to Foucault, Basaglia, etc….

But if we read Foucault’s book on madness, we see that by no means does he call on psychiatric patients to speak. Foucault does of course evoke great psychotic authors and artists like Sade, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Nerval, Van Gogh, Roussel, Artaud… But these men were never silent, they produced scores of works and many have become classics of literature or painting. Of great madmen we can say everything except that they remained silent! From this point of view we can say that it’s more authors like Freud (27), Canetti (28) and Lacan (29) who have allowed madness to speak, when they interpreted in detail the autobiographical book by President Schreber (30), the most commented psychotic work of the 20th century.

Foucault entitled his book History of Madness and not History of Psychiatry, but he doesn’t actually let the mad speak: instead, he analyzes the apparatuses that have given madness a status and a role between the Middle Ages and the 19th century and of which psychiatry, a medical specialty, is a fairly recent avatar, having originated in the 18th century. Foucault’s intentions were historiographical and hence, broadly speaking, scientific. 

Yet we cannot deny Foucault’s link with anti-psychiatry and the reform movements that led to the obsolescence of mental asylums almost everywhere in the world. (31) Here we register a fundamental element of tension in Foucault’s works and personality. The fact that on the one hand he uses all the forms and rules of historiographical research, that he addresses historians of medicine and of culture; and on the other the fact that he seems to envision a “militant” application of his research, a condemnation of the power apparatuses that tend towards controlling all things that seem to be near the limits of humanity. This other side of the medal in Foucault’s works lent itself wonderfully to the discourses by the political and ideological currents of the sixties and seventies. So Foucault became one of the main cultural references for the emancipatory and protest movements of those roaring years. But we can read Foucault, and appreciate his intuitions, even without deriving militant consequences from them. Because, as we said, Foucault’s works cannot escape the fundamental key he applies to history: the way power relations are built in relation to a knowledge that aims at truth. This is the problem: Foucault did not support any possible power system in particular! Not even the anti-psychiatric system.

8

There was a famous dispute between Foucault and Derrida over some of the pages of History of Madness. Here Foucault evoked a passage from Descartes’ Meditations on methodological doubt, the passage that leads him to the certainty of  “cogito ergo sum”: Descartes seems to exclude the false perceptions of the mad from his argument. Foucault interpreted this exclusion of madness from philosophical consideration as the theoretical expression of a process taking place in society, and in French society in particular, which he called the Grand Renfermement (The Great Confinement) of the mad. Before the 17th century the mad were somehow made to move around in a sort of forced vagrancy, for example on the “ship of fools”, Narrenschiff. Instead, from the 17th century onwards the mad begin to be locked up together with other deviant and “immoral” individuals in specific institutions. There would seem to be a homology between the establishment of Cartesian rationalism and certain specific administrative measures adopted at around the same time. 

Derrida (32), who in fact admired Foucault, objects that Descartes’ argumentative path actually faces a doubt about the radicalness of madness: the illusions induced by the supposed Evil Genius that deceives us in everything, even when we do arithmetic or argue rationally. Far from excluding madness from philosophical argument – Derrida points out – Descartes confronts himself with déraison (unreason) as a fundamental starting point for a philosophical discourse towards truth. In fact, Descartes considers the delusions of someone dreaming, insofar as they are somehow madder than the mad. Indeed, Descartes says, if I believe the dream I’m dreaming is a reality, I can think that the reality I’m living is also all a dream. “Now, the recourse to the hypothesis of the evil genius will make present and summon the possibility of a total madness [Derrida’s italics], a total panic [affolement: from folie, madness] which I would not be able to control, since it is afflicted on me – ex hipothesi – leaving me no responsibility for it”. (33)

In addition, Derrida tries to prove that from its very beginnings philosophy, far from expelling the experience of the nut as impertinent to its meditations, has always thematized madness as a possibility to reckon with. For Derrida the “cogito, sum” also applies to the mad, and is ultimately a philosophical act that is in itself mad, because it establishes a point – and une pointe, point, witticism, sting, jibe – that situates itself beyond the totality of entities. Cogito is therefore considered to be a “jibe” of philosophical hybris which occurs in all acts of true philosophy in other forms, an act that carries with it a challenge to determined reason, hence an act always on the border of madness. 

Foucault replied to these objections, (34) but he didn’t take them well and broke his friendship with Derrida for nine years.

There’s no need today to take sides with Foucault or Derrida. This debate is part of the history of philosophy today. Derrida definitely had good reasons to criticize the former’s reconstruction of the Cartesian text, as Foucault failed to consider the phase of the text known as of “hyperbolic doubt”, the total uncertainty due to the Evil Genius. It must also be said, however, that Derrida, without realizing, followed the classic criticisms that many, historians in particular, would make of the History of Madness and of other Foucauldian historiographies. (35) These criticisms, also based on historical documents, basically criticize the idea that there have been fundamental changes in social attitudes towards madness between the Middle Ages, or rather antiquity, and today. They challenge, for example, the claim that medicine, in the form of psychiatry, took total control of madness only in the 19th century with the institution of psychiatric hospitals as purely medical environments. Objections to Foucault all go in the direction of rejecting the historical discontinuities he stresses: they aim at a continuum in the treatment of madness, from Hippocrates, who dedicated whole passages to the treatment of insanity, all the way to today’s psychiatry. For these critics there’s progress, not discontinuity. 

We can find inaccuracies and mistakes in any great theoretical text from the historical point of view. But this task of documentary correction turns out to be powerless when it aims at subverting a text’s underlying theoretical decision. Let’s say that Foucault’s critics are right, that from the historiographical point of view things did not occur exactly as Foucault reconstructs them. But what really counts is that Foucault introduces the discontinuistic outlook into historical reconstruction. The adoption or not of this outlook is what matters. Historical data can be interpreted differently according to the paradigm one adopts. The point is: do we or do we not adopt Foucault’s historicist outlook?

As they didn’t adopt it, Foucault’s critics won’t go down in history, while Foucault will. In a certain sense, one goes down in history for one’s mistakes – and this, after all, is what Foucault tried to tell us.

As we’ve seen, Foucault’s aim in the early phases of his work was to stress historical ruptures and turns, paradigm shifts, we would say in Kuhnian terms. Now, it seems to me that Derrida’s operation is similar to that of the historians who criticize Foucault: he minimizes the Cartesian turn in philosophy. He thinks that philosophy has always been troubled by the possibility of psychotic illusion, of delusion, with no real ruptures. It is true that the important philosophies, since Antiquity, somehow butt heads with common sense (which, instead Descartes praised, calling it the most fairly distributed thing in the world) and hence commonsense people think there is always a halo of madness in philosophy. Ultimately, Descartes wants to show that common sense wins philosophically over madness even when the latter is philosophical. A strait-laced discredit of philosophy is always in the air, one Descartes intends to reverse. This is why the rise of rationalism (and of modern science) in the 17th century also marks a general change in attitude towards what we would call today “the irrational”. For example, at more or less the same time European kings and emperors barred fortune-tellers and astrologists, who had been regular figures of the courts, preferring to surround themselves with scientists and scholars. Derrida underestimates discontinuity in the history of philosophy, as well as the relations, which Foucault reveals to be quite close, between philosophical reflection on the one hand and government of the living on the other. Ultimately, Foucault thinks that history isn’t made so much by the masses, as is often stated democratically, but above all by philosophers. They are the ones who provide conceptions of the world and of life for their epoch, which will then become paradigms for governments, even those of the mediocre. Rationalism has implied a renfermement not only of forms of madness, but also of everything in society that expresses irrational forms of life.

Derrida therefore deprives the Cartesian Cogito of its character of historical event, i.e. it’s being the institutive act of scientific rationalism. Rationalism was based on a specific premise we don’t find in previous philosophies: to found truth on certainty. Only what we can be certain of is true. The “cogito ergo sum” is a pointe in which thinking is revealed to be certain: it certifies being. The entire pars destruens of methodological doubt in Descartes’ text – which Derrida rightly sees as a dramatic confrontation with madness as a possibility always facing reason – finds its sense in the pars costruens, which has to reaffirm truths that needed to be safeguarded at the time: the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the construction of a true science based on certainties. And that the cogito has a historicity – no less than specific administrative acts regarding the insane – is proved by the fact we live in an entirely different regime of thinking, as science isn’t by any means based on certainty, but on skillfully exploiting uncertainties, probabilities and possibilities. Now, Derrida admits this too: this pars construens of Descartes’s thought – which today we consider outdated – excludes the madness that seemed instead to have been integrated in the cogito, in the sense that even a madman – Derrida points out – can say “I think, therefore I am”.

(Here’s a cue for a Foucauldian reading of our present: is there a relation between contemporary epistemology– which today is mostly based on the Popperian criterion of falsification – and the reforms in psychiatry which have de facto dismantled psychiatric hospitals?)

But is it really true, as Derrida says, that a madman too can agree with the statement “I think, therefore I am”? We know that psychotics can even be certain of their non-existence. In the late 19th century we became acquainted with the Cotard delusion, or the “walking corpse syndrome”, cases of subjects who affirm they are already dead or do not exist. The fact that they think of themselves as dead doesn’t prevent them from being certain of their non-being. This is what a psychotic philosopher like Louis Althusser thought. He was convinced he did not exist. (36) And every time one of his books was published, he feared that sooner or later a reader would discover his secret: his non-being. This means that existence and thinking do not imply each other.

To sum up, the act of cogito doesn’t necessarily include madness, because Descartes’ intention was to show that an act of thought guarantees existence, and to guarantee that something exists thanks to Cogito. A guarantee that doesn’t apply to madness. 

9

Derrida also wondered about Foucault’s ambivalence towards Freud and psychoanalysis, (37) “he wants at once to accredit [accréditer] and discredit [discréditer] Freud.” Foucault admits that his thought owes much to the modern Trinity – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (38) – but he disassociates himself both from the Marxist vision of history and Freud’s theory and practice. In History of Madness he writes:

Freud went back to madness at the level of its language, reconstituted one of the essential elements of an experience reduced to silence by positivism; he did not make a major addition to the list of psychological treatments for madness: he restored, in medical thought, the possibility of a dialogue with unreason [déraison]. (39)

But on the other hand, in the same book he writes:

It would be fairer to say that psychoanalysis doubled the absolute observation of the watcher with the endless monologue of the person watched – thus preserving the old asylum structure of nonreciprocal observation but balancing it, in a nonsymmetrical reciprocity, by the new structure of language without response.

In other words, on the one hand he recognizes the mutation psychoanalysis brought to psychiatry; taking the discourse of the mad seriously and trying to interpret it. But on the other he sees that the asymmetry in the analyst/patient relation, in which the analyst interprets while the patient is interpreted, is a continuation, albeit with an innovative stance, of the psychiatric relation, in which we have a knower and a known one. In short, psychoanalysis is still a power apparatus founded on the claim of a scientific knowledge – though not a positivist one – on madness. 

I think, however, this ambivalence of Foucault towards psychoanalysis is a consequence of his fundamental attitude, at least in his early phase, towards any kind of knowledge. As a historiographer, he observes the difference of psychoanalysis’s relation to mad discourse from that of psychiatry before it, which he sees as closely linked to the mental institution. And psychoanalysis is not a product of the madhouse, but of a private liberal profession. The patients of psychoanalysts are not sick persons who need to be protected, they are paying clients. Instead, insofar as Foucault wants to be, obliquely, a critic of any power-knowledge, he cannot avoid stressing that there’s an asymmetry in psychoanalysis too, one between the interpreting analyst and the “client” object of the interpretative process, between the analyst who directs the treatment (in Lacanian terms) and the directed analysand. Yet it is well known that, in private practice, “the client is always right”.

If Foucault had dealt with the way psychiatrists who were followers of Basaglia programmed their work in Italy after the law that abolished psychiatric hospitals, as a historian he would certainly have stressed the novelty of a community care, as it is called in Great Britain (cure not in hospitals but in the community), but as an anarchic critic of any form of power-knowledge he wouldn’t have neglected to stress that even Basaglia was “governing madness”, certainly less repressively than the previous psychiatry, but in any case still exerting a form of power over those who become mad. In fact, Italian psychiatrists still have the option of performing what is called a TSO (compulsory health treatment), i.e. to hospitalize a critically ill person against his or her will. 

With time Foucault seemed to begin to realize that an anarchic critique of every form of historically established power-knowledge leads nowhere: every society is based on a certain mode of governing the living. There are no anarchical cultures, and every society has to confront illness, madness, crime and sexuality when it causes to problems (and we all know it causes problems!).        

With time Foucault tended to tone down his critical charge, even with regard to psychoanalysis. More than a criticism of power-knowledges, what interested him in a later stage was to understand how every epoch builds for itself a form of life starting from a bet on truth.

Deleuze writes: “If power is constitutive of truth, how can we conceive of a ‘power of truth’ which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power?” (40) But the point is exactly this: that for Foucault the power of truth and the truth of power are not two opposed instances but always intertwine to the extent of being almost indissoluble. And the lines of resistance against the power of any particular epoch – cultural oppositions – even if they allow truth to emerge, tend in turn to want to establish themselves as truths of power. It’s the all too familiar destiny of all Revolutions, which always – as the term Revolution means – go back to the starting point.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, “The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II”, in Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984, translated by G. Burchell, London: Picador, 1984.

2. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (1966),

3. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’age classique (1961).

4. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique (1963).

5. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (1975).

6. In Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, cit.

7. Michel Foucault, On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980, New York: Springer, 2014.

8. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, New York: Springer, 2008. See my review of this seminar: “Foucault e il governo liberale”, Mondoperaio, May-June 2005, pp. 94-102. http://www.sergiobenvenuto.it/communitas/articolo.php?ID=134. 

9. See the posthumous book by Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair, Gallimard, Paris 2018. Eng. Tr.,  The History of Sexuality: 4: Confessions of the Flesh, trans. by Robert Hurley, London: Penguin, 2021. And S. Benvenuto, "The Pastoral Ministry, Ancient and Modern" [on Foucault's Les aveux de la chair], American Imago, vol. 76, 1, Spring 2019, pp. 39-47, https://www.sergiobenvenuto.it/thesubject/article.php?ID=169 

10. He did however develop the reconstruction of a specific case: I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother…, Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

11. See Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault by James O'Higgins, Salmagundi,No. 58/59 fall 1982-winter 1983, pp. 10-24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40547562 also in The Will to Knowledge, New York: Vintage, 1990.

12. This led to a theory of homosexuality that I would define as ultra-historicist, which considers it a very recent invention. See K. Plummer, ed., The Making of the Modern Homosexual, Hutchinsom, London 1981. D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, Routledge, New York-London 1990. D. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2002.

13. See G. Dall’Orto, Tutta un’altra storia. L’omosessualità dall’Antichità al secondo dopoguerra, Milan : Il Saggiatore, 2015.

14. The Will to Knowledge, cit.

15. At Foucault’s time these terms were not widely used as it is now in non-Anglophonic countries. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Social-Tolerance-Homosexuality-Fourteenth/dp/0226067114. 

16. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, cit.

17. In particular in T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

18. See P. Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, London & New York: New Left Books, 1975, a work Foucault publicly praised. See M. Foucault, On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980.

19. See Michel Foucault, “L’archéologie du savoir”, an interview with J. J. Brochier, Magazine littéraire, April-May 1969.

20. P. Veyne, “È possibile una morale per Foucault?”, in P. A. Rovatti, ed., Effetto Foucault, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986, p. 32.

21. Ibid, p. 31.

22. D. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, Hutchinson, London 1993, pp. 173-77.

23. “Foucault Responds to Sartre”, interview by J.P. El Kabbach, in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), trans. John Johnson, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Simiotext, 1989), 38-39.

24. I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother… University of Nebraska Press 1982.

25. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, Gallimard, Paris 1963.

26.  J. Russ, Histoire de la folie. Foucault, Harier, Paris 1979.

27. Sigmund Freud, Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia paranoides), SE, 12, pp. 9-92.

28. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Penguin, London 1973.

29. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, book III. The Psychoses (1955-1956), W. W. Norton & Company, New York 1997.

30. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, New York Review Books Classics, New York 2001.

31. The intellectual and then reform movement that condemned the mental asylum system began with the famous 1961 study by E. Goffmann: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Anchor Books, New York 1961. Goffman and Foucault’s books were the main frames of reference for psychiatric reform in the various countries where they were implemented.

32. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, in L’écriture et la différence, Points, Paris.

33. Derrida, “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, cit.

34. In the 1972 revised edition of Histoire de la folie.

35. See G. Swain, Le Sujet de la folie, naissance de la psychiatrie, Privat, Toulose 1977. G. Swain, M. Gauchet, La pratique de l’esprithumain. L’institutionasilaire et la révolutiondémocratique, Gallimard, Paris 1980. P. Morel, C. Quétel, Lesmédecines de la folie, Paris Hachette, 1985. R. Castel, “Lesaventures de la pratique”, Le Débat, 41, septembre-novembre 1986. G. Swain, “Chimie, cerveau, esprit”, Le Débat, 47, novembre-décembre 1987. C. Quétel, “Faut-il critiquer Foucault?”, in AA.VV. Penser la folie. Essais sur Michel Foucault, Paris: Galilée, 1992, pp. 79-105.

36. Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time, New York: New Press, 1993.

37. Jacques Derrida, “’Etre juste avec Freud’. L’histoire de la folie à l’âge classique” in AA.VV., Penser la folie. Essais sur Foucault, Paris : Galilée, 1992, p. 149.

38. See Foucault, “L’archéologie du savoir”, cit.

39.  See Foucault, Histoire de la folie, cit.

40.  Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988.