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From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters. Picador is proud to be publishing the lectures in thirteen volumes. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were preorogatives of power in the nineteenth century. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking.
Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines. His works include Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches philosophy, divinity, and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and is executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. He has published numerous studies on Michel Foucault, and is the author of the Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts and coauthor of La Philosophie comme manière de vivre.
Translator Graham Burchell lives in Italy. He has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect: Essays on Governmentality.
From 1971 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault taught at the Collège de France, one of the most unique and renowned institutions of learning in the world. It enrolls no students and confers no degrees. Professors are required to deliver lectures to the general public on topics from their ongoing research. Foucault's lectures at the Collège were extraordinary events. To the audiences that attended them—frequently numbering in the thousands—they were seminal events, profoundly influencing an entire generation of scholars, students, and writers.
These lectures, painstakingly reconstructed from tape recordings and from Foucault's own notes, are now being made available in English for the first time. Under the guidance of series editor Arnold I. Davidson, Holtzbrinck will publish all thirteen volumes of the lectures in North America.
Abnormal is the second volume of this series. Based on lectures given in 1974-1975—the period when Foucault was working on Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and the first volume of the History of Sexuality—they reveal Foucault's on-going investigation into the "network of power and knowledge" constituted by discipline, normalization, and biopolitics. He argues that the three figures of the human monster, the individual to be corrected, and the onanist were brought together under the domain of the abnormal at the beginning of the nineteenth century, linking deformity, delinquency, and sexual deviancy. Rather than being purely coercive and violent, however, power, Foucault argues, must also be conceived of as productive: a power that is linked to positive techniques of intervention, transformation, and fabrication. He also traces a shift here from judicial inquiry of actions and relationships to an "examination" of the body and its desires. "The body and its pleasures, rather than the required form for legitimate union become, as it were, the code of the carnal."
As Davidson emphasizes in his introduction to this volume, Abnormal "adds yet another layer to the virtually inexhaustible fields of study that Foucault's work has bequeathed to us." Indeed, every course at the Collège de France contributes immeasurably to our understanding and appreciation of the most important works of one of our greatest contemporary thinkers. These lectures also stand on their own as incomparable performances of intellectual daring, imagination, and insight.
"The importance of these lectures is that they are directly connected with two of Foucault's greatest books, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Because they are clear and to the point, the lectures throw considerable light on the more difficult ideas and passages of their related published works . . . [Abnormal] looks at a set of what Foucault believed to be defining criminal cases of how the West has constituted and reconstituted what is normal and not normal behavior."—Charles Mudede, The Stranger
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are . . . [He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture."—The Nation
"Comprises previously unavailable work produced by one of the most incisive cultural theorists of the century."—Alan Reed, See Magazine (Named a Top Ten Book of 2003) "The importance of these lectures is that they are directly connected with two of Foucault's greatest books, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Because they are clear and to the point, the lectures throw considerable light on the more difficult ideas and passages of their related published works . . . [Abnormal] looks at a set of what Foucault believed to be defining criminal cases of how the West has constituted and reconstituted what is normal and not normal behavior."—Charles Mudede, The Stranger
"These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work—the relationship between power and knowledge."—Library Journal "[This] second collection of lectures by the influential philosopher addresses the role of psychiatry in the modern criminal justice system, the theme of societal defense against criminals, how to define 'abnormality' and 'normality', and how to identify and categorize criminal behavior and perpetrators."—Forecast "Brilliant and vivid . . . What distinguishes these lectures is their narrow focus and an abundance of meticulously compiled historical detail, which offer the reader a rare insight into Foucault's thought processes and working methods . . . Foucault's site of research and the place of his thinking become discernible to the reader with astonishing immediacy . . . Reading these lectures, it is at times astonishing to what extent Foucault's voice regains presence, relocating the reader into the crowded lecture auditorium at the Collège de France where those words were spoken."—Bobby J. George and Felix Grisebach for Curled Up with a Good Book
"This is the second volume in the complete Collège de France lectures of Michel Foucault. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the Collège de France. Attended by thousands, they created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal af0 justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who 'resemble their crime before they commit it.' Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining 'abnormality' and 'normality' were prerogatives of...
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Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book takes as its starting point the notion of "biopower," studying the foundations of this new technology of power over populations. Distrinct from punitive disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security. In this volume, though, Foucault begins to turn his attention to the history of "governmentality," from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state--shifting the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government. In light of Foucault's later work, these lectures illustrate a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin.
Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the pre-eminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.
Arnold I. Davidson is Series Editor, and teaches Philosophy, Divinity, Comparative Literature, and History of Science at the University of Chicago, USA. He is Executive Director of the journal, Critical Inquiry and Co-editor of the anthology, Michel Foucault: Philosophie.
Graham Burchell is Translator, and has written essays on Michel Foucault and is an Editor of The Foucault Effect. Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing on a history of "governmentality" from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennelart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the former almost entirely eclipses the former." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, it is tempting to see these lectures as the moment of a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin. "The English translation of Security, Territory and Population is a major event not only for Anglophone readers of Foucault’s work, but for all those concerned with understanding our present social and political condition. These lectures show that the trenchant analysis of biopower, 'power over life,' which Foucault had begun in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and which he pursues here in terms of technologies of security, led him to a decisively deeper and more radical formulation of his guiding problematic—what he called 'the government of the self and others'—the issue that would serve as the basis for all his subsequent work. Security, Territory and Population might thus properly be called the ‘missing link’ that reveals the underlying unity of Foucault’s later thought . . . Burchell’s translation is meticulous, supple, and attentive to the nuances of Foucault’s fluid lecture style. We all stand in his debt."—Kevin Thompson, Book Review Editor, Continental Philosophy Review, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University "The English translation of Security, Territory and Population is a major event not only for Anglophone readers of Foucault’s work, but for all those concerned with understanding our present social and political condition. These lectures show that the trenchant analysis of biopower, 'power over life,' which Foucault had begun in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and which he pursues here in terms of technologies of security, led him to a decisively deeper and more radical formulation of his guiding problematic—what he called 'the government of the self and others'—the issue that would serve as the basis for all his subsequent work. Security, Territory and Population might thus properly be called the ‘missing link’ that reveals the underlying unity of Foucault’s later thought . . . Burchell’s translation is meticulous, supple, and attentive to the nuances of Foucault’s fluid lecture style. We all stand in his debt."—Kevin Thompson, Book Review Editor, Continental Philosophy Review, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University "These lectures offer the wonderful opportunity of witnessing a great mind at work. In answering the question of whether the general economy of power in our societies is becoming a domain of security Foucault is never less than erudite, insightful and challenging. Here, probably better than anywhere else, we see the nature of his thoughts on the rationality of modern government."—Jeremy Jennings, Department of Politics, Queen Mary University of London, and editor of The European Journal of Political Theory " Security, Territory, Population is a stunning display of Foucault's skills of historical research and theoretical insight. Exploring the emergence of 'bio-power' and the 'techniques of security' designed to shape and regulate populations from a distance, Foucault looks beyond disciplinary power to a distinctively modern form of government through freedom. Accessible and highly readable, these lectures have much to tell us about our contemporary situation."— James Martin, Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of LondonTable of ContentsForeword Introduction 11 January 1978 18 January 1978 25 January 1978 1 February 1978 8 February 1978 15 February 1978 22 February 1978 1 March 1978 8 March 1978 15 March 1978 22 March 1978 29 March 1978 5 April 1978 Course Summary Course Context Index of Notions Index of Names ...
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An examination of the relation between war and politics, by one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers
From 1971 until 1984 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures ranging freely and conversationally over the range of his research. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. ...
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In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.
In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitudes -- in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death....
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Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing on a history of "governmentality" from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennelart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the former almost entirely eclipses the former ..." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, it is tempting to see these lectures as the moment of a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin. Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the pre-eminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.
Arnold I. Davidson is Series Editor, and teaches Philosophy, Divinity, Comparative Literature, and History of Science at the University of Chicago, USA. He is Executive Director of the journal, Critical Inquiry and Co-editor of the anthology, Michel Foucault: Philosophie.
Graham Burchell is Translator, and has written essays on Michel Foucault and is an Editor of The Foucault Effect. Marking a major development in Foucault's thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of "bio-power," introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault's attention turns, focusing on a history of "governmentality" from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennelart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to "shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the former almost entirely eclipses the former." Consequently, in light of Foucault's later work, it is tempting to see these lectures as the moment of a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the "government of self and others" would begin. "The English translation of Security, Territory and Population is a major event not only for Anglophone readers of Foucault’s work, but for all those concerned with understanding our present social and political condition. These lectures show that the trenchant analysis of biopower, 'power over life,' which Foucault had begun in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and which he pursues here in terms of technologies of security, led him to a decisively deeper and more radical formulation of his guiding problematic—what he called 'the government of the self and others'—the issue that would serve as the basis for all his subsequent work. Security, Territory and Population might thus properly be called the ‘missing link’ that reveals the underlying unity of Foucault’s later thought . . . Burchell’s translation is meticulous, supple, and attentive to the nuances of Foucault’s fluid lecture style. We all stand in his debt."—Kevin Thompson, Book Review Editor, Continental Philosophy Review, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University "These lectures offer the wonderful opportunity of witnessing a great mind at work. In answering the question of whether the general economy of power in our societies is becoming a domain of security Foucault is never less than erudite, insightful and challenging. Here, probably better than anywhere else, we see the nature of his thoughts on the rationality of modern government."—Jeremy Jennings, Department of Politics, Queen Mary University of London, and editor of The European Journal of Political Theory "Security, Territory, Population' is a stunning display of Foucault's skills of historical research and theoretical insight. Exploring the emergence of 'bio-power'and the 'techniques of security' designed to shape and regulate populations from a distance, Foucault looks beyond disciplinary power to a distinctively modern form of government through freedom. Accessible and highly readable, these lectures have much to tell us about our contemporary situation."—James Martin, Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, University of London ...
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Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them. Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling. For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds....
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With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris. Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality. "Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary."Le Monde, July 1978...
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When one defines order as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls exotic charm. Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault....
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In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality. Throughout The Uses of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior?...
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The final volume in the definitive collection of Foucault's articles, interviews, and seminars. Power, the third and final volume of The New Press's Essential Works of Foucault series, draws together Foucault's contributions to what he saw as the still-underdeveloped practice of political analysis. It covers the domains Foucault helped to make part of the core agenda of Western political culture—medicine, psychiatry, the penal system, sexuality—illuminating and expanding on the themes of The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Power includes previously unpublished lectures, later writings highlighting Foucault's revolutionary analysis of the politics of personal conduct and freedom, interviews, and letters that illuminate Foucault's own political activism....
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this liberal governmentality. This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed: "Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics". What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the Eighteenth century? What crisis of governmentality characterises the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to? This is the diagnostic task addressed by Foucault's study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism: German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault's sole foray into the field of contemporary history. This course thus raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics. A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of homo oeconomicus. Foucault's analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by "society" in relation to government. "Society" is both that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism. Far from being opposed to the State, civil society is thus shown to be the correlate of a liberal technology of government. Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the pre-eminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.
Arnold I. Davidson, editor of the series of Foucault's published lectures, is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Professor of the History of Political Philosophy at the University of Pisa. He is co-editor of the volume Michel Foucault: Philosophie.
Graham Burchell, Translator of this volume, has written essays on Michel Foucault and is an Editor of The Foucault Effect. This series of lectures presents Foucault's study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism: German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault's sole foray into the field of contemporary history. This course thus raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics. A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of Homo oeconomicus. Foucault's analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by “society” in relation to government. “Society” is both that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism. ...
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The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history....
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When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them. ...
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